To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed the entire object, paste this HTML in websiteTo link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed this page, paste this HTML in website

1
WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Marie S. Senzig
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: August 16, 2013
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is—What day is it?—August sixteenth—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
MS: The sixteenth.
TS: —2013. I’m at the home of Marie Senzig in New Bern, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Marie, how would you like your name to read on your collection?
MS: Probably with my rank—naval rank; Captain—
TS: Okay.
MS: —all capitalized; capital C, capital A, capital P, capital T, Marie S. Senzig.
TS: Okay, we probably—when they—when they put it on the collection they’ll do the Marie S. Senzig for the collection name.
MS: Right.
TS: And then they’ll have—we’ll have your information in the biography like that.
MS: Okay, that’s fine.
TS: Okay; alright. Well, Marie, thanks for letting me come and talk with you today. Why don’t we start out by having you tell me when and where you were born?2
MS: I was born in Baraboo, Wisconsin, December 31, 1957, and then resided in Lyndon Station. The hospital was thirty miles away, so.
TS: Okay. And so, do you have any brothers or sisters?
MS: I have seven brothers and five sisters.
TS: So you have a few.
MS: A few.
TS: Where do you fit in that hierarchy of siblings?
MS: Number six.
TS: Sixth oldest?
MS: Yes, so there’s seven below me.
TS: How many boys and how many girls do you have?
MS: Seven boys, six girls.
TS: Is that right?
MS: Yes.
TS: So who ruled that—that family?
MS: My mother.
TS: [chuckling] There you go. Did your—Did your mom work with all those kids or—
MS: She—
TS: I mean, I know she worked.
MS: She had a fulltime job in her house.
TS: That’s right.
MS: She said she liked being her own boss.
TS: That’s right.3
MS: She decided what day she did laundry, what day she did this, what day she did that. My dad was the breadwinner in the family and he worked away all week long and was only home on the weekends.
TS: What did he do?
MS: He worked for a construction company, working on high voltage lines.
TS: Oh my gosh.
MS: So if there would be a big ice storm he would be one of those people who went out with the bucket truck and didn’t come home for a couple weeks until everybody had their electricity back.
TS: That’s kind of a dangerous job, with all those kids.
MS: He did lose an eye.
TS: He did?
MS: Yes.
TS: Oh my goodness. That’s—That’s wild. Now, tell us what—So was it a rural area that you lived in; suburban? What—
MS: It was. It was a town of three hundred and fifty people.
TS: Okay.
MS: And it’s now up to four hundred and seventy-four people. There’s still not a stoplight in town.
TS: No?
MS: So—It’s rural, south central Wisconsin; a lot of dairy farms and cornfields.
TS: Well, tell us a little bit about what it was like to grow up in such a large family. That’s—Even for the time that would have been unusual for that many kids.
MS: A very Catholic family.
TS: Yeah?
MS: [chuckling] I—I think, honestly, that’s one of the things that drew me to nursing.
TS: Okay.4
MS: And especially obstetrical nursing. Every time I would go through labor with a woman—Because I practiced obstetrical nursing in a day when there weren’t laboring epidurals, so everybody got to experience the joys of labor pains, and every time I watched somebody go through labor it increased the appreciation I had for my mother going through that experience thirteen times. So I—I couldn’t imagine growing up in a small family, because whenever you wanted to do something there were always enough people to play badminton over the hedge, or get a game of softball together, or the boys with their basketball games, and there was always somebody to play Monopoly with, or to play Canasta; lots—lots of playmates all the time. And we got along pretty well that—it was a very orderly, German household. Everybody had their chores, and as long as everybody did what they were supposed to do, the household ran very smoothly, and you never showed up late for dinner if you wanted to get food.
TS: Because it would be gone, right? [chuckles]
MS: It would be gone.
TS: That’s right. So what—what would be, like, some of the chores you got to do?
MS: The women did the inside work and the men did the outside work. It was a very segregated household, in those respects.
TS: Okay, gender segregated.
MS: Yes, it was. So the women, we did the dishes, and we once asked my mother if she’d get a dishwasher and she said no, she had six of them. Not thirteen, just six, so she didn’t need a dishwasher. So it was setting the table for dinner and doing the dishes and putting the kitchen to rights afterwards; ironing; cleaning bathrooms. We had a two story house so my mother didn’t go into the upstairs; she had two daughters who lived in the upstairs and it was our job to clean it every Thursday, and bring all the laundry down, and get the laundry and then take it back upstairs. And—And you grew up learning to cook, making cornbread and making cakes and watching her get a starch and a meat and a vegetable all on the table, hot, at the same time. So to me, the holidays are not the holidays unless I have a house full of people. So when I would be over in Sardinia or Iceland or Guam, I would always invite lots of people over for the holidays. And if I cooked the whole meal they were always amazed that everything got on the table, hot, at the same time, and I had many people ask me, “How do you do that?”
And I said, “Well, you just know how if you grow up doing it and watching your mother do it in the kitchen.” We didn’t grow up with casseroles. My dad didn’t care for casseroles.
TS: Is that right? Oh my gosh.
MS: So it was always meat, potatoes, and a vegetable. 5
TS: Yeah?
MS: So you just grow up knowing how to do that.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: How to do that; when things were done and pulling it out.
MS: Right.
TS: Did you have a lot of bread—homemade bread or anything like that?
MS: Not homemade bread.
TS: But bread.
MS: Bread, yes.
TS: Did you—Did you play any sports or—
MS: I was never very good at sports. I—[chuckling] kind of—kind of klutzy. I was one of those girls that always got picked last at school for the teams, so my sports were always—I—I took up running when I was in the navy because you ran against your own time and it was a solitary sport that I didn’t have to compete against anybody.
TS: So you didn’t do it until you were in the navy though?
MS: Correct.
TS: How neat; okay. Tell me—I know what I was going to ask you was; describe your house, because I’m just wondering, like, how many kids were in a room; that kind of—
MS: We had one, two, three bedrooms downstairs and really, technically, two bedrooms upstairs, but there was a large room as you walked through that had two beds in it and then a hallway ended up with a bed in it upstairs, and that was always a younger child who didn’t require any privacy. And so, it was two people to a double bed, and we had bunk beds, and always a baby in a crib that was in somebody’s bedroom. So—
TS: So were the girls responsible for taking care of the babies, too, as you got older?
MS: I ended up potty training my youngest brother.
TS: Yeah?6
MS: My mother said he would have been in diapers till he was eighteen. She just ran out of the emotional oomph and stamina to do it one more time. And of course, it was easy for her. The child would come to her and need to have the diaper changed and she would just say, “Go see your sister.” And so, I got tired of changing dirty diapers so I pulled out the potty chair and potty trained him.
TS: [chuckles] That’s great. So you’re—Now, where was your school, like your elementary school?
MS: The elementary school was the Catholic school directly across the street though grade four, and then that closed down so starting grade five we went—it was about twelve miles up the road, so rode the school bus up to the county seat which had a whopping, like, thirty-four hundred people at it, to the Mauston-area of schools. And so, I did fifth grade through twelfth grade in that school system, and then graduated from the—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: From that?
MS: —from Mauston-area high school.
TS: So if you were—let’s see. As a young girl then, you’re growing up in the sixties at a young age.
MS: Yes.
TS: Do you remember when the—President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy was shot?
MS: I do.
TS: And the Catholic family, too, so I would wonder—
MS: I do. I—I remember being home from school that day and sitting on the couch, and distinctly remember watching the caisson rolling down the street.
TS: But do you remember when he was actually shot?
MS: I don’t remember that.
TS: No?
MS: But I do remember watching the funeral on TV.
TS: So you would have been about six years old.7
MS: Correct.
TS: Yeah. Do you remember later when Martin Luther King, Jr. was—and Robert [Francis] Kennedy; that same year; ’68?
MS: Yes; yes; I do.
TS: What was your reaction to that?
MS: It was a shame that Robert Kennedy was shot while campaigning, and the same thing with Martin Luther King [Jr.]. I mean, all those great figures and—and standing for—for certain things that some people just don’t care for.
TS: Yeah? So you were, like, elementary, middle school when the—I would say, the height of the sixties were going on.
MS: Yes.
TS: Do you—Did—Was there any counter-culture in that—in the area that you lived in in Wisconsin?
MS: I—I wouldn’t say—The state capital, Madison, is very liberal, but my mother didn’t drive so we rode the school bus to school, and you rode the school bus back home. We only got one channel on TV so the TV was really never on, and so we didn’t get exposed to a whole lot. And my parents really didn’t talk—of course, my dad was only home on the weekends, and then he was so busy working to get extra money to feed his thirteen mouths, they didn’t really talk politics. So I was not exposed to a whole lot. I mean, listened to the Beatles music along with my oldest sister who was into the Beatles, and—
TS: Yeah. So maybe your older—some of your older siblings might have had a little bit more connection to that.
MS: Correct. Correct.
TS: Neat. Well, were you—What about school? Did you like school?
MS: I was always a good student; I was one of those geeky, nerdy kids who hung out in the chemistry lab.
TS: Is that right?
MS: And then I played trumpet in the school band, so—
TS: How long did you play?8
MS: Through high school, and then I was actually the bugler and did “Taps” when I was in Guam for the military funerals there.
TS: Oh, that’s really neat.
MS: And then I—I and my younger sister played—it’s called “Echo Taps,” for my dad’s funeral because he was a World War II veteran.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: When he passed away.
TS: That’s really neat.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So you—Were you—Did you have any favorite teachers?
MS: I did, and they were probably the math and science teachers; Margaret Ann Steiner. Everybody called her Ma, for M-A; Margaret Ann, and she was my algebra teacher. And then Mr. Nathan Figi was my chemistry teacher. And Mr. Harlow Gerhardt was the biology teacher, and I had occasion last summer to actually go on a bus trip and Mr. Gerhardt was on the same bus trip. So I had a chance to go and tell him how—how I always admired his teaching style, and there are certain teachers that you remember their names and there are certain teachers you don’t, so he was one of those that I always remembered.
TS: Where were you at on the bus trip?
MS: It went to New York City.
TS: Okay.
MS: Went with my mother and my sister and my niece.
TS: Very neat.
MS: Yes.
TS: So where—Did you—Did you always want to be a nurse or—
MS: I—Yeah, from earlier times on I—that was something that always interested me.
TS: Yeah? So when you were in school was there an expectation that you were going to go to college?9
MS: College was never mentioned in our household. My dad made it through sixth grade, so his expectation was that you graduated from high school and that was—he was thrilled to have all high school graduates. The girls are the ones with college degrees. I think because it was a very male-dominate household, that was our ticket out. So my oldest sister has a PhD in clinical psychology. I have a master’s. I have another sister who has a master’s in education who’s a teacher in Montana, and another sister who has a—an associates in art and is an executive secretary. And I have a sister who’s a medical stenographer.
And my brothers—one year, at the technical school, one of them did carpentry and he has supported himself his whole life with that.
TS: Yeah.
MS: So he’s really the only one who utilized a trade that he went and got further education for.
TS: [unclear] the school.
MS: They’re all blue-collar jobs for the men. The women went out and got higher education and got the better paying jobs.
TS: I see. So what—At what point do—were you thinking about the military?
MS: My senior year in college, when it was time to start thinking about, “What do I want to do with my nursing degree?”—I knew I was a very shy, introverted person, and I had worked the entire time I was in college at our little local county hospital as a nursing assistant, so if I went back there I just had this vision of myself at age fifty, still being single, still working at that little hospital, still living in my parents’ house, and that mental image scared the heck out of me. So I did something very uncharacteristic and got out of my comfort zone, and remember vividly walking through a large snow bank to get to the navy recruiter’s office—because I always liked being around the water and I grew up landlocked in Wisconsin—and walked into the navy recruiter’s office and, like, the next week he had me up in Minneapolis [Minnesota] for a physical, and when I called my mother and told her I was thinking about joining the navy she had a very shocked response. She said, “You, of all my children, I thought would never leave me.”
And I said, “That’s why I thought I better do something drastic.” And then she wanted me to get stationed at—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did you tell her that at that time?
MS: I did.
TS: Yeah.10
MS: And then she wanted me to get stationed at [Naval Station] Great Lakes, Illinois, because it was only three and a half hours away, and I said, “No, I joined the navy to get away from home, not to be stationed close to home.” So that—that was a very drastic step for me, the—and the navy certainly has helped me bloom and develop. People who know me now can’t believe that I was ever shy and introverted. But I still do test out introvert on a Meyers-Briggs [Type Indicator], because interacting with people exhausts me, and then I need to have my alone time to recharge the batteries, and that’s the—the hallmark of a true introvert. An extrovert is energized by interactions with people.
TS: Right. I think that’s great that you talked about that because I think a lot of people have a misconception about the difference between those. It’s not that you don’t want to be around people, it’s just like you say; you’re energy doesn’t come from that.
MS: Correct.
TS: It comes from other things; your alone time and things; yeah.
MS: Right; right.
TS: That’s really neat. So you’re—you’ve joined the navy.
MS: Yes.
TS: What did your dad think?
MS: I had to, kind of, corner him to ask him, and he was—he thought it was a good decision. He thought it was a—it was a sound decision; I could make a good living. So that was—He never—He never told me to my face he was proud of me. He told other people around the town that he was proud of me. My father was—was a—was a very—a stoic German. He never—He never showed a lot of emotion. He did with my mother. I have vivid memories—I mean, she would be cooking a meal at the stove and he would come up behind her and say, “Could I have a kuss?” He never said kiss; it was kuss; must be German for kiss. And she would turn around, they’d do a little smooch on the lips, he’d say, “I love you,” and he’d walk away.
TS: Sweet.
MS: Most men, I don’t think, do that, but my father did that routinely. And so—And obviously they were demonstrative in the bedroom with thirteen children.
TS: [chuckles] Yes.
MS: But he didn’t show a lot of emotion with his children. So I—He thought it was a good decision to join the navy.11
TS: What about the rest of your siblings?
MS: I never really asked.
TS: No?
MS: Now that I’m retired and—and some of them came to my retirement ceremony, so they understood the rank that I had achieved. While I was in the navy I don’t think they really had an understanding, because the only person in the family besides my father who served was my youngest brother who was in the navy as well and was enlisted. And so, he understood about my rank and he had told me that when I retired he was going to make sure he came to my retirement ceremony, and he did. And my mother thought it was going to be this little five minute ceremony, because she came to my promotion ceremonies for commander and captain, and they’re—you stand on the quarterdeck and you raise your hand and then you have cake. And I had kind of a big whoopty party when I made O-6, which is quite an achievement. So—And quite a bit of my family came up. But it was still only a five minute ceremony, and then we had a nice party afterwards. But the retirement ceremony was an hour long, and she said afterwards she had no idea that it was that big a deal. So I never really got much from them. Now, since I’m retired, and the ones who came to the ceremony are impressed.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But usually when I go home I’m just someone who’s young enough to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the floors and cook meals and help my mother, so—
TS: Well, there you go; very good. So—So when you went—you went in the navy—let’s see—1980.
MS: Yes.
TS: And did you have any, kind of, like—You had officer training then or were you—because you would have, like, just been commissioned.
MS: Correct.
TS: Did you have to go through any, kind of—
MS: I went through six weeks of officer indoctrination school in Newport, Rhode Island [Officer Development School, Officer Training Command [OTC] Newport]—
TS: Okay.
MS: —when I first joined. So my sister Marcy—who’s a year younger than I—she and I did a little road trip in my brand new car; the first one I had ever had. I went all the way through college with my two feet for my transportation; didn’t have a bicycle; didn’t have 12
a car. So I did buy a—a stripped down model of Pontiac Phoenix; never driven a stick shift in my life, and that’s what I got so—[chuckles] I—I rolled through a lot of stop signs at the beginning when I was afraid I wouldn’t get it started again without stalling. But—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: I can relate to that.
MS: —she and I drove out together to Newport, Rhode Island, and then I think Providence was maybe where she caught a little puddle-jumper jet and prop-plane to the bigger airport, and then she flew back home.
TS: Very neat.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So was it after your—after your officer training, then where were you stationed?
MS: Millington, Tennessee.
TS: Now, did you put in for that assignment? Do you have a dream sheet, as—in the navy, for things like that?
MS: We did, and when the recruiter came to my house to swear me in, you had three choices. I really didn’t know. I had put a couple down and I couldn’t think of a third one and he said, “Well, I’ll just put Millington, Tennessee down,” and that’s where I ended up. And it’s fine. My whole career, I can’t say I had a bad duty station, because you quickly learn it’s what you make of it. Even if it wasn’t someplace you asked to go, there are always new people to meet, new friends to make, and they all turned out to be wonderful experiences. If you go expecting to have a bad experience, maybe that’s what happens. But I always went with an open mind and made lots of friends.
TS: How—Was it—Was it easy for you to, like, pick up—because how many moves did you make? You made—
MS: Oh, I think probably about ten of them.
TS: Ten, in the—in the twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years.
[Speaking Simultaneously]13
MS: Well, you get very—you get very good at it.
TS: Every two and three years.
MS: Right. And one of my friends—I think I had just gotten, maybe, here—someplace, and she came over to my house two weeks after my—I got my shipment of my household goods. And she walked in and said, “Looks like you’ve been here forever. You already have pictures on the wall.”
I said, “Well, I—I can’t live with the boxes. And so what I learned to do is open up all the boxes and put everything on the floor in the rooms.”
TS: In the rooms they belong in.
MS: And then you just—I hated to see the clutter so it forced me—And if you just have boxes neatly stacked up, some people never get to their boxes. They just move the closed boxes from place to place. And I always opened up every single box and put everything in it’s rightful place, and then I could—I could live, because I—
TS: Otherwise, it would have been difficult.
MS: It would have been stressful to me—
TS: I see.
MS: —to do it any other way, so I got very good at it.
TS: [chuckles] That’s neat. So what—At this first duty—So it’s your first duty assignment. Well, what was it like to actually—to, like, put on the uniform for the first time? How was—How did that feel?
MS: Well, luckily we did a lot of putting on the uniform in Newport, Rhode Island.
TS: Yeah?
MS: So—
TS: That’s where I mean.
MS: Oh, okay. Well, like I said, I hadn’t really been exposed to any military things, so the first thing—and growing up in a family of thirteen children and being poor, the first thing that really made an impression was they gave me three hundred dollars for a uniform allowance, and then promptly forced me to buy six hundred dollars-worth of uniforms, which created some stress in my life because now I was three hundred dollars in debt. So—Because you had a sea bag; you had to purchase certain things, and you had a uniform fitting and all that.14
TS: You had a checklist of things to get, right?
MS: Correct. Right. And when I joined we were still wearing nursing uniforms with white hose and white shoes and a nursing cap with your stripe, on the nursing cap. So—And it snapped on, so as you changed rank you just changed the stripe and kept the same nursing cap.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Is that right? Interesting; okay.
MS: Yes. Yes.
TS: What—Was there anything about officer training that was difficult, hard, challenging?
MS: I think the transition. It was funny, because in my mind I thought it was rather a rough transition. In fact, when I—some of the folks in our little Charlie Company—there were four companies; Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta; I was in Charlie—took me out to the officer’s club and got me a little inebriated because I was not—
TS: Green? [chuckles]
MS: Well, I was a little stressed.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: It was funny because at the end our company commander complimented me on what an easy, smooth transition, in his eyes, I had made to the military. And I kind of looked at him and thought, “Boy, you don’t have a clue. I almost jumped out of the window one day I was so—”
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But it—it was a nice group, and I have occasionally run into people. It’s funny because one of my closest friends, turns out, was an officer in indoctrination school at the same time I was, she was just in Delta Company and I was in Charlie Company. Oh, she was in Alpha. But—
TS: Real close together.
MS: Well, we were there at the same time.
TS: And you never knew it until many years later?15
MS: Correct. When she saw the picture on the wall in my—and said, “I have that same picture on my wall. When did you go to OIS?” And we discovered we were there at the same time.
TS: That’s interesting. There you go.
MS: Yeah.
TS: How was your first duty station?
MS: I really enjoyed it, and looking back I think I got there shortly before Thanksgiving. One of the first things that happened was—and I think she was a lieutenant commander—some navy nurse invited me over to her house for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. That’s just the way navy nurses are; very nurturing; they take people in; they make them feel welcome. And—And then she promptly had me do some house-sitting for her to watch her house; big beautiful house. Because I lived in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] for two years, so people would use me as their house-sitter. Two things: it put somebody in their house and it got me out of the BOQ for a little bit. But—And I think that warm, welcoming approach taught me that’s what you do when you have new navy nurses come onboard. You make sure that they feel welcome and that they feel taken care of, because over the years people told me that was something I did well, and I think it all stemmed back to the person that did that for me when I went to my first duty station.
TS: Do you think in that way, in the navy, maybe in the military in general, that it’s not just what you’re doing at work, it—the off duty people are looking out for each other; especially the leadership, is making sure that the junior ranking are looked after?
MS: And that’s very true. And that’s especially true when you’re overseas, and you know that some of these kids are there for the first time, far away from their parents, they’re starting a new family, and you make sure that there’s somebody there that you’re—you become their surrogate parent, and making sure that there’s food in the house, that they aren’t feeling melancholy around the holidays. And that was one of the reasons why I always cooked big meals and invited everybody over, to make sure if somebody was single that they had someplace to go. And it—A lot of the married people would invite the single sailors over to their house, but I, as a single sailor, always felt a little bit like I was crashing their family holiday. And so, when I would send out the invitations I would always say, “From one orphan to another, I’m single. You’re not crashing any family holiday. Please come over so I don’t have to make this big turkey dinner for Thanksgiving and eat it all myself.” And—And then we would spend hours playing Trivial Pursuit or whatever the latest board game was. We always had a lot of fun, and it was a mix of guys and gals, enlisted and officers, sometimes people from outside of the command; like in Iceland, the other people who lived in my building.
TS: So you had a good crowd? Yeah, actually.
MS: Yes.16
TS: Now, I heard—I don’t remember if this is on tape before or we started the tape, but you had talked about Canasta. I think you did say that.
MS: Yes.
TS: Now, did you teach very many people to play Canasta? Do you guys play Euchre in Wisconsin?
MS: Oh yes, we play Euchre.
[Canasta and Euchre are card games]
TS: Okay.
MS: And Canasta, I’ve actually found people when I cruise who play Canasta.
TS: Oh, did you?
MS: And I have taught one of my friends to play Canasta. I teach more people how to play Cribbage.
TS: Oh, Cribbage, right.
MS: And that’s a big game in Wisconsin as well.
TS: Yeah?
MS: And Sheepshead is a big Wisconsin card game that very people—few people know. It’s a German—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: That one I have not heard of. I have not heard of that one.
MS: It’s a German card game, so.
TS: Yeah, I know, in being from a wintery state, you’re used to playing a lot more board games and—
MS: Correct.17
TS: —keeping yourself occupied during the winter months when you’re inside, so yeah.
MS: Correct. Correct.
TS: Now, was this, like, the first time you’d been away from home for a long time, except for, I mean, being in college?
MS: It was. It was.
TS: Was that difficult?
MS: I don’t remember it being particularly difficult, I think because during college I only went home—since I didn’t have a car, I only went home when there was a holiday school break. So I was away from home, basically, the whole semester, and would just go home at the semester break.
TS: Yeah. But now you’re out on your own and—
MS: It—I would go home occasionally because Memphis was about a twelve and a half hour drive.
TS: Not too bad.
MS: It was pretty straight, south to north, up [Interstate]-57 and around Chicago and home.
TS: How did you like your job?
MS: I did. I started out—There were three of us who checked in at the same time, and the director of nursing, we were all in her office together, and she said, “Well, I need somebody to go to the med[ical]/surg[ical] ward, I need somebody to go to the obstetrics ward,” and “Who wants to go to obstetrics?” And nobody raised their hand and my hand shot right up in the air. “Well, that was an easy one. Okay, Ensign Senzig, you—you go to obstetrics,” and I had some great civilian teachers.
TS: Did you?
MS: Civilian nurses who were teachers, yeah.
TS: What was it that they helped you with?
MS: Learning to be an obstetrical nurse.
TS: Just the whole nine yards?
MS: Yeah; yes. And I—Like I said, back in the day before there were laboring epidurals, one of them, we called her Admiral.18
TS: Even though she was a civilian?
MS: Right.
TS: Okay.
MS: Because she told the doctors what to write and they wrote the orders, because she had been a nurse for years. And I was coaching one of the labor patients and she said—pulled me out of the room and she said, “Now, I’m going to tell you, this is the time when you lie. If they look you in the face and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Have you ever had any children?’ you look them square in the eye and you say, ‘Yes.’”
TS: [chuckling]
MS: “Otherwise, they’re not going to do what you tell them to do.”
TS: And so did you stick with that advice?
MS: I don’t think anybody really ever asked me.
TS: Okay. It never came—
MS: Because if you act like you know what you’re doing and you obviously know how to coach them, that’s not really something they ask.
TS: And they’re not thinking about that.
MS: No.
TS: They’re thinking about other things, right?
MS: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
MS: And they’re some very interesting stories from labor and delivery.
TS: Well, tell me one.
MS: Well, the one—I think I was working the night shift and there was—a very young gal came in. She must have been thirteen; very, very young. And she was in labor and there was nobody in the room with her. Her parents were probably out in the waiting room. And she was screaming all the time, and I’d go in and say, “Are you in pain? Do you need me to get you some Demerol; some pain medicine?”
“No, I’m okay.”19
And you’d go out and she’d be hooping and hollering again. And I’d go in and she would—never said she needed anything. And finally one of the times I went in I said, “Well, if you don’t need pain medicine, why are you yelling so loud? Why are you screaming?”
And she said, “Well, my mother told me the baby comes out of my mouth, and I have to open my mouth up wide enough for the baby to come through.”
And I said, “Oh, I hate to tell you, the baby’s not coming from there.”
TS: Oh, goodness.
MS: “You remember where that boy put that thing to plant that little seed in your tummy?” I said, “That’s where the baby is coming out.” And her eyes got really big.
TS: [chuckling] Oh my gosh. How old was she?
MS: I think she was probably twelve or thirteen.
TS: Oh, Lord.
MS: She was very young.
TS: Wow.
MS: We had some very young teens in Tennessee.
TS: So was it—it was a civilian hospital or—
MS: No, no, it was a military hospital and the parent—
TS: Was in the—I see. But just a young girl—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
MS: Either was retired military or was active duty.
TS: I see.
MS: And if their child got pregnant, the child was eligible for care.
TS: I see.
MS: Now, the baby got an initial six-week checkup, and then the baby was not eligible for care unless the parents adopted the baby.20
TS: Did that happen?
MS: Not usually.
TS: No?
MS: They went and found civilian healthcare for the baby.
TS: I see.
MS: Yeah.
TS: Now, so why were there civilians nurses?
MS: Because there weren’t enough navy nurses.
TS: Oh.
MS: There’s never enough navy nurses.
TS: There’s not?
MS: So you supplement with civilian staff.
TS: Okay.
MS: Plus, it gives some continuity. As your navy nurses are moving in and out—your navy corpsmen—you’ve got some stability.
TS: In a particular place.
MS: Right.
TS: Okay. Well, we’re going—I’m going to go through some of the places that you were at and—but I would like to know—Now, you said every assignment is what you make it, right?
MS: Yes.
TS: And you went there with—so it’s [unclear] a good experience everywhere, but if there was, like, a place you never wanted to leave—Was—Was there one like that? Like, the best assignment, for whatever reason?
MS: Well, it’s interesting because there were cities I really liked, and then there were duty assignments I really liked. 21
TS: Well, let’s talk about the cities you really liked.
MS: I really enjoyed Charleston, South Carolina; gorgeous city. My mother always thought I would go there to retire, so she was kind of surprised I didn’t. And I said, “Well, the state of North Carolina doesn’t tax my military retirement pay. The state of South Carolina does. Charleston’s close enough I can go and visit.”
So I enjoyed—I guess I—I really enjoyed Puerto Rico as well. As far as the people I worked with, Guam was one of my more favorite duty stations. I loved the climate. I made some—two really, really good friends there who remain dear friends of mine to this day.
And the camaraderie in Iceland. The weather was terrible. I don’t need to go back there and live again. I got two winters and one summer in my nineteen months there. But the camaraderie. Since the weather was so horrible the warmth of the people made up for it, and we had a very small hospital. And I was the chief nurse there and there were only fifteen navy nurses, and our commanding officer was a very warm, gracious man and he—he was an excellent leader.
So—And we were always doing potlucks, so there’s always cooking to be done, and I love to cook so I got ample opportunity to cook. So I would say probably—and you’re probably noticing this trend—Puerto Rico, Guam, and Iceland.
TS: So your overseas?
MS: Overseas duty stations.
TS: Yeah. And so, you got to do that three—three times out of your—
MS: Four times.
TS: Four times?
MS: Sardinia was also a—
TS: How was that?
MS: That was probably my most interesting, challenging duty—
TS: Now, where’s Sardinia?
MS: It’s a little island off—Maddalena was a little archipelago of islands off the northern coast of Sardinia. Sardinia is the main island, but I was on a little island off the main island, which then sat off the coast of Italy. So I always told people I was on an island off an island off the coast of Italy.
TS: Okay.22
MS: So you—And it was about a twelve square mile island. You could bicycle around it in about an hour and a half.
TS: It’s like [unclear] Island.
MS: Yes. And so, I was the officer in charge of the clinic, so logistics were always a challenge, as far as just getting things to our little branch medical clinic. And it was before the days of computers on everybody’s desk. We had an admin[istrative] office that had, like, three computers. I, as the officer in charge of the clinic, did not have a computer in my office, and I had no air conditioning in my office. I was on the third floor and it was 107 degrees sometimes down there. And so, you had a ceiling fan, and I had my own balcony with French glass doors, so you’d open up the wind—open up the French doors, have the ceiling fan on, and you would put a rock to hold the papers down in your inbox so they wouldn’t blow all over your office. And if I needed something typed I took it over to the admin office and they did it and then they brought it back, and then I proofed it, made changes, and sent it back over for them to do again.
But it was very entrusting and I had a—the commanding officer of the naval support activity, who was a line officer, who was a mustang—People who are military understand that. It means he was enlisted first and came up through the ranks and then got a degree and became an officer. And he and I would go running at lunch time, and he would say, “Well, what problems are you having today? Is there anything I can help you with?” And we would discuss things while we were doing our lunchtime run, and he was a great support for me because my bosses were over in Naples, Italy; we were a branch clinic of Naples. And if I didn’t tell him, they didn’t know what was going on. I was at the pointy end of the spear, so to speak. And we had a fax machine, and that’s what we lived and died by, was the fax machine. And if we ran out of fax paper it was an emergency. [both chuckle]
TS: Yeah, I can see.
MS: And it was the old thermal paper fax machine and it—
TS: With the purple color and—
MS: Yes, and it was down in the basement of the clinic, down in the dental offices, and our supplies were up in the attic. And so, when the supplies came in somebody would get on the 1MC [1 Main Circuit; public address circuits on U.S. Navy vessels] or the intercom and they would say, “Supply truck is out front. Supply truck is out front,” and that means—meant all available hands muster downstairs, and everybody would unload the truck, including the officer in charge, and you would schlep—And you couldn’t drink the water. It had heavy minerals in it, and—which would leech into your brain and cause problems, so bottled water for everything. So you had to lug so—
[Speaking Simultaneously]23
TS: They didn’t have a purifying system or anything?
MS: No.
TS: No? Wouldn’t work?
MS: —so much bottled water up those stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, basically to the attic, so many, many trips. And we didn’t have an elevator. And the doctors’ offices were on the second floor, so when the pregnant women came in—
TS: Oh, goodness.
MS: —they had to take the stairs as well. So—And the pregnant women got sent to Naples, Italy, when they reached thirty-six weeks to something called the stork’s nest, and it was basically, kind of, a—a hotel or bed and breakfast, and the women would sit there and just wait to go into labor, because we were a little tiny island and there was a little local hospital but it was kind of 1950s and this was 1990s.
TS: So you were like a clinic, then?
MS: We were a clinic.
TS: Clinic, okay.
MS: We had two family medicine doctors, and two nurses, and about fifteen corpsmen. And so, when medical emergencies came in—We got to deliver a baby in the middle of the night in the clinic one night. [chuckles] So at—to me—And the family medicine doc, he loved obstetrics. The only job [unclear] him on this tour was he didn’t get to do obstetrics and deliver babies. And I was an obstetrics nurse so, to us, it was no big deal to just, kind of, catch this baby. And—But the executive officer—the naval support activity—thought it was big news because I went down—Once a week we met and all the officers in charge of, what were called, tenant[?] commands—you would get together and the executive officer would relay all the news and any things coming up, and then you would go through and tell them all the news from your command; “We have a health fair coming up,” or “We have an inspection,” or this and that, or “Doctor So-and-so is going to be in leave so there’ll be a different doctor coming in,” or “The optometrist will be over for a week from Naples so if you want to schedule appointments our books are open”; those kinds of things.
And so, I had given my little blurb of what was going on and she said to me, “Well, Commander Senzig, you didn’t tell is the most exciting thing.”
And I looked at her and I said, “Ma’am, what are you talking about?”
She said, “Well, you have a big pink stork on the door of your clinic.”
I said, “Oh, yeah, we delivered a baby in the middle of the night.”
She said, “Well—”24
I said, “Well, look, I’m an obstetrics nurse. It’s no big deal.” But they all thought—And then all the pregnant ladies wanted to know why they still had to go to Naples; why couldn’t they just stay here and deliver their baby in the clinic in the middle of the night.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: So we had to explain that was not really how we did things, but—
TS: Right, that was an unusual circumstance.
MS: It was. It was.
TS: Yeah.
MS: And then it was a challenge when we would have deaths, trying to get the bodies off the island because, if you remember I said, it was an island so we had to go by the ferry’s schedule, and then the ferry took you to just the other side—from this little island to the very northern part of Sardinia, an island, then it was an hour and a half through curvy, mountainous roads to get to the airport in Olbia, and then the military would fly a plane in to take the body in the casket—the pinewood box—and then fly them to Naples to then embalm them.
So if it’s summertime and it’s 107 degrees, and you’re sitting on the tarmac in an air conditioned ambulance, yes, but it’s only air conditioned—
TS: For a short period of time?
MS: No, for hours sometimes.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: So they learned to ask us when the next ferry was so they could bring the plane in shortly after we arrive there. So we had to use the produce truck—the refrigerated produce truck. We started using that to transport the bodies in the coffins to Olbia.
TS: To keep it refrigerated.
MS: Right. And—And the—the buyer for the navy exchange, who was a gal, said to me, “Please don’t ever tell the workers that we used this truck for that or they will never put produce in it again.”
TS: Right.
MS: So I mean, it was a—it was challenges. And then we had a—we had a naval—a submarine tender that was homeported there, which is why we were there; to support the 25
submarine tender. And women could serve onboard the ship, but of course you don’t put pregnant women onboard the ship; they get screened out.
Well, somebody fell through the cracks and delivered a baby very prematurely onboard the ship, so we get this frantic call. And then you’re trying to get a doctor with a—with a little preemie isolette and some corpsmen, so we had to use the commodore’s boat to take them out to the ship. And of course the ship doesn’t have endotracheal tubes for a little twenty-eight week old baby, so the baby didn’t make it. But then the whole investigation—how did a pregnant woman—and it was her third baby, so how do you—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did she know she was pregnant?
MS: —not know you’re pregnant with a third baby? I don’t know, but—
TS: She said she didn’t know, though?
MS: Right. She said she didn’t know. But—So it was just—And then trying to get the baby off. So we had to—And then the gal who delivered in the clinic, we had to go down to the town square and we had registered the baby in the town books as a—as a live birth and then the baby had dual residency; Italy and—and the United States. And so, it was very interesting tour.
TS: Yeah, it does—it sounds like it was.
MS: It was.
TS: And how long was that tour?
MS: That was two years.
TS: That was two years? And that was—let me see on my list here.
MS: That was 1993 to 1995.
TS: Okay, ’93 to ’95.
MS: I was a lieutenant commander and that was where I—I got selected for commander; found out I had been selected for commander while I was there.
TS: Oh, neat. Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your promotions and things like that. So having become a captain, do you feel that you were treated fairly throughout your career for promotions?26
MS: Oh, absolutely.
TS: Yeah?
MS: Yeah. If there was any bias it was not with me being a woman; it was single versus married.
TS: Why is that?
MS: When I was in Iceland, I was the only single, and coincidentally the only female, O-6, but it nothing to do with me being female. But with me being single, I was not allowed to live in the O-6 quarters.
TS: Why not?
MS: Because I wasn’t married. Those were married quarters. But they could have taken any of those quarters and the commanding officer of the base could have designated it a bachelor officers’ quarters, had he been so inclined. He was not so inclined, so I would—
TS: Is that how that works at other places too?
MS: Generally, if you are single, there’s not a lot—if you’re a single officer, a lot of the bachelor officer quarters are only transient; they’re not for people to—
TS: Live in permanently.
MS: —permanent residency.
TS: Same for men and women?
MS: Right. And so, if you’re a single officer, you, more times than not, end up living off base. Where if you were a married officer, there would be more on base housing. Dislocation allowance was given to married people but not to single people. I guess it—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What’s dislocation allowance?
MS: They gave you—When you’re moving you can’t move any of your dangerous kitchen chemical. You can’t move the—the Pledge, the toilet bowl cleaner, the this, the that. You don’t want to take your dirty broom and your dirty mop to another place, so a lot of that stuff has to get thrown out and you have to buy new wherever you go.
TS: Okay, so the—so you get an allowance for those kinds of things?27
MS: Correct.
TS: I see.
MS: Correct. And they didn’t give it to the single people who moved into the same type of quarters as the married. I still moved into an apartment that had three bedrooms, and I had to clean and I had to go out and buy all those things just like the married person did. They got reimbursed for it; I did not. So if there was any bias it was not—I didn’t encounter gender bias, I encountered—It was more beneficial to go in and be married and have a spouse than it was to be single.
TS: Did you find assignments went that way too?
MS: No, not really.
TS: No?
MS: No.
TS: Just where the slot was available?
MS: Right; right. They didn’t—Now, the only place would be—some of these places, if they’re remote, if you have a child or spouse who has health problems, they could not go. They’d have to stay back behind. Where if they had a different place they could send you where the services were available for them, then they would send you there, but—
TS: The serviceperson or the—
MS: Correct.
TS: Okay.
MS: Right.
TS: So the—
MS: But with me being single, I never had to worry about, “Were there services for my child, for my spouse?” So it really opened more things up for me, being single.
TS: How?
MS: Because I didn’t have to worry about taking the family along, and were there services for them or not. Now, when I first joined the navy they didn’t allow women onboard ship, and so that’s why so many overseas duty stations makes you competitive, just like shipboard duty makes you competitive. And partway through they did open up shipboard 28
assignments to women, but by then I was an obstetrical nurse. They still don’t allow pregnant sailors onboard ship, so that—
TS: So that would mean—
MS: Right.
TS: I see. I thought that they opened up some ships to women in the seventies. Maybe it was just a—
MS: For line officers, I think.
TS: I see; okay.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So you’re—I’m just going to ask you, then, about your— [phone rings] What was that? Do you need to get that? I think—Okay.
So we talk about your twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years that you were in, from 1980 through 2008.
MS: Yes.
TS: The time—That period of time for women underwent a lot of change, not only in the military but in the civilian world too. Did you—Were you cognizant of those changes as they were happening, or sitting back and reflecting on it, in the navy? Can you—Can you talk about that at all?
MS: I guess maybe it’s more sitting back and reflecting, because when I was in there—the one change that I do remember was when I came in, probably my second duty station, was when women were finally allowed to stay on active duty if they got pregnant. So the navy nurses, there were no pregnancy uniforms. At first, they had to go out and buy civilian pregnancy nursing uniforms, and then the military did come out with maternity uniforms for pregnant sailors, but that was one of the things that changed. And then when I first came in, once they did allow women to stay on active duty if they got pregnant, then it was—you could still, no strings attached, say, “I’d rather get out,” and they let you out of your contract. Then they quickly discovered a lot of young kids who weren’t adjusting, or didn’t like the rules and the rigors of military life, were getting pregnant just to get out of their contract; kind of a long term solution to a short term problem. So they changed the rules to make it not quite so easy to get out if you got pregnant.
Then when they allowed women onboard ship, and women were routinely assigned to shipboard duty, the same thing was happening. Women were getting pregnant to get out of shipboard duty. So it used to be if they got pregnant they would take them off the ship, cut them a whole new set of orders, and send them to another duty station. So then they got wind, and got a little savvier, that girls were getting pregnant just to get off the ship. Again, long term solution to a short term problem.29
So then, what they instituted was, “Okay, you come off the ship while you’re pregnant, but four months after delivery you resume your shipboard duty on that same ship.” Now, not only are you onboard ship, but you’ve got to leave your baby with somebody else, and find somebody to take care of your baby. So once they instituted that and word got out to these gals that you were still going to complete your shipboard duty, the reasons for girls getting pregnant kind of went away. And we still do have some “ooops,” because when you put eighteen year old hormones together with males and females onboard ship in tight quarters, they find all kinds of little spaces to have fun, and sometimes birth control fails or they don’t always exercise it, and girls still do get pregnant but not in the numbers they did when they were first assigned shipboard duty.
TS: So it was like a learning curve for the navy to figure out—
MS: Right.
TS: —the balance.
MS: Right, and then the tail follows once they figure out what’s going on, and then they can bring in the—the regulations to fix that.
TS: I see; very interesting.
MS: Yes.
TS: Now, did you see changes for nursing as you were—over that twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years? I’m sure you did.
MS: Changes in the [U.S.] Navy Nurse Corps. When I first came in we had one admiral in the navy nurse corps. Navy nurses, the most you could achieve was to be a director of nursing at a hospital. That was the pinnacle of your career, other than the one person who was the admiral of the Navy Nurse Corps. Now, navy nurses are commanding officers of hospitals, they’re executive officers of hospitals. We have more than one admiral. We have a three star admiral, we have a two star admiral, we have one star admiral.
TS: So were the—the executive officers of—commanding officers, were they doctors at the hospitals or what—
MS: It used to be it was always the physician who was the commanding officer.
TS: Okay.
MS: Now they usually try to have either the executive officer or the commanding officer be a physician. And now it might be either a physician or a navy nurse. A lot of times, one of them will be a Medical Service Corps officer.
TS: Okay.30
MS: Because they have the admin side of the house.
TS: Did you see any changes in actually nursing techniques; things like that?
MS: Well, in labor and delivery, laboring epidurals are now the norm—
TS: Right.
MS: —which they weren’t way back when. Now they Skype deliveries.
TS: They do?
MS: So—
TS: How do they do that?
MS: Well—
TS: How do they Skype a delivery?
MS: Well, somebody’s there with the—the—the computer, with a video camera and Wi-Fi [wireless internet connection], with the husband over in Iraq or Afghanistan, where they’ll video it and then they’ll—they’ll send the video, but now they do do some Skyping.
TS: Okay, so it’s like someone’s Skyping it—I see, okay. Somehow—
MS: So they can attend the delivery.
TS: I see. Interesting. So that kind of communication has—has changed—
MS: Right.
TS: —for staying connected with your family—
MS: Right.
TS: —in that way. Now, did you stay in obstetricians—that field the whole time?
MS: As you get more senior it becomes more administrative. In Charleston I became, what’s called, the division officer, which is the charge nurse of the labor and delivery unit, and so I still did lots of labor and delivery, and then I would go to my office at the end of the shift and do the paperwork.
Sardinia was where I was—it was a clinic so it was strictly administrative, although with us being two nurses we did carry a radio/pager for a week at a time. So if 31
somebody needed IV [intravenous] antibiotics, we’d come into the clinic and do it around the clock; those types of things. But it was mostly administrative.
And then Keflavík, Iceland, even though I was the chief nurse we only—there were only fifteen us so if they needed—especially if we had a laboring patient and the nurse didn’t have a lot of labor and delivery experience, I let them know that they were free to call me and I would come in and sit with them and help them out. So I did that a couple times. They would call me and I would go in and sit with them.
We had a patient who was quite ill; I wasn’t sure the nurse had the—the background, I wasn’t real comfortable, so I just came in and did the shift with them. And once I recognized that the patient was—because it was a patient who had preeclampsia, which is a post-partum—antepartum problem, and being a labor and delivery nurse I knew a lot, and he didn’t have really any labor and delivery background. So once her kidneys kicked in I knew she had rounded the corner and I said to him, “Okay, I’m going to go catch a couple hours of sack time now in that room. She’s out of the woods."
So—But otherwise it was—And I would do the occasional weekend when they were short a nurse in rotation because someone was out. And there I was the acting executive officer, the acting commanding officer when the commanding officer and executive officer were gone.
And then my last duty station here, I was—
TS: [Marine Corps Base] Camp Lejeune?
MS: Yeah. Started out the Deputy Director of the branch clinics, and a lot of the—in charge of getting the supplies and ordering new equipment, doing all the fitness reports and the evaluations for the corpsmen; did a lot of the administrative work because the director was a physician. So I let him interact as a physician and a guy with the line officers, and I took care of the admin behind the scenes things, and that worked very well for us. And then I went over to the hospital and became the quality manager, so—in charge of making sure that we followed all the joint commission regulations and the Inspector General of the navy regulations, and that our care was safe.
TS: Right. Well, now, when you became—Well, I guess I don’t know if I want to get there yet or not, because I kind of want to go back to some of your earlier assignments when you were—had less rank.
MS: Yes.
TS: And so, you went to—So after Tennessee you went—Is that when you went to Puerto Rico right away?
MS: Yes.
TS: Oh, tell me about that. How was that?
MS: That was—It was fun. My person who had been my charge nurse in Millington, Tennessee—surprise, surprise—was my charge nurse in Puerto Rico, so I already knew 32
my boss. So going down, that wasn’t an anxiety producing thing. And back in the days when we had nurseries, I was assigned to the nursery, and—and would come out and help with labor and delivery when they needed help. That’s where—I think I had delivered one baby in Millington, Tennessee with a doctor standing over my soldier because they knew I was going overseas and wanted to make sure I had a delivery under my belt. And I delivered, I think, four more babies in Puerto Rico because, oops, they don’t always get there.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Just—Because you were just there—Yeah, I see.
MS: Right. And babies come fast sometimes. I—I don’t know what to say about Puerto Rico. I mean, I sometimes got pulled over to the medical-surgical ward to help out over there. You kind of became a nurse of all trades. And I would say actually, from Puerto Rico to Bethesda [Maryland] was where I worked on the labor and delivery for two years, and then I got called into my supervisor’s office one day and told that, basically, starting the next day I was getting assigned to the post-op cardio-thoracic surgery unit. I—
TS: Had no idea what you were—had in that experience for that, right?
MS: I didn’t—Right, and I didn’t have a choice, and I was not very happy with that decision, and took every opportunity when I was up there to offer to run lab work, because I would—I would cry on the way to the lab, give myself a good talking to, get it out of my system, and by the time I got back I was good to go again. And actually I ended up liking the unit after I learned a little bit about cardiac nursing and got good at it. And—But you didn’t always have a choice where you went. So that was probably one of the more stressful times; getting pulled out of an area where I knew I wanted to go get my master’s degree and was going to submit paperwork to do that, and told that I was going to go do something totally different that I had no training for.
TS: How did that work out for you?
MS: Well, actually, the medical-surgical part of it stood me in good stead, like when I was doing the quality management piece here, because you—you understood post-op surgical and—and chest tubes and some other things. So it makes you a better rounded nurse to have different, varied experiences. And I had the—the out-patient experience from when I was in Sardinia, and then again when I was over at the submarine base in Washington state.
TS: Is that like another one of—getting out of your comfort zone a little bit?
MS: Yes.33
TS: Was that—Like, did you have to be pushed a little for that, sometimes?
MS: Well, that time I wasn’t given a choice.
TS: [chuckling]
MS: I was pushed over the ledge.
TS: Okay.
MS: Told to find a soft landing.
TS: Did you have—Well, actually, let’s pause it for a second here.
[Recording Paused]
TS: I’m going to say we’re back. Okay, we took a short, little break, and so I’m back here with Marie. And Marie was just telling me that she has a—some—something you’d like to tell me about your experience in Puerto Rico.
MS: It was—We left off I told you I was a labor and delivery nurse—
TS: Right.
MS: —and delivered some babies there. And it would be funny because I would be in the nursery on a day shift and the chief nurse—director of nursing—would come up and she’d say, “We got a request for five navy nurses to come for lun—have lunch on the Australian ship [unclear] that pulled into port this morning. So you’re here. You go ahead and go, and I’m sure they’ll be serving alcohol so please don’t come back to work this afternoon.” So you’d get the afternoon off and you’d go have lunch and drink beer with some Aussie officers. And it’d be funny because they always would radio ahead and ask for navy nurses, assuming they were all girls.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But we had some single male navy nurses, so every once in a while they would come along too, and the looks on these guys’ faces when they found the male navy nurses there.
But yeah, I—We went to a German ship, we went to an Australian ship, went to a British ship.
TS: Were they all males on those ships?
MS: They were.34
TS: Yeah?
MS: This was back in the eighties, so yes, they were. And then there was a—On the admiral’s lawn—the admiral’s quarters—they had, kind of, a mixer for the officers from—and I’m pretty sure it was the Aussie ship and the American, so we—we all went—the navy nurses—and we were playing croquet and they had this big cake—sheet cake with an Australian flag and an American flag with hands hold—And so, it was kind of a mixer to promote good relations between the Australian military and the U.S. military, and frequently joint exercises and things. So that—that was kind of an interesting sideline, that I got a chance to go onboard some of the ships form the other countries and meet some of their officers.
TS: How were you treated on those—on those ships?
MS: Oh, we were always treated like royalty because we were their guests. They wanted these navy nurses to come and mix and mingle because they’d been out to sea for a while, all these guys. They just liked to look at girls.
TS: [chuckles] It’s not one of those things where what happens on the ship stays on the ship?
MS: No, no.
TS: Just all—
MS: It was—It was—It was pretty much above board.
TS: Okay; pretty much.
MS: Pretty much above board.
TS: Okay. But you did do some of the—not going back to work because of the—having some alcohol, right?
MS: Right, and it was funny because when I first joined the navy in Millington, Tennessee, it was okay to have a beer at lunch and go back to work. We never did in the hospital, but when I would have a day off during the week and I’d go over to the exchange, the guys would be in their dungarees having lunch and they’d have their beer because it was perfectly acceptable. And it was probably a couple of years in the—it was in the early eighties sometime when that culture changed and they were not allowed to. And as you and I were discussing, the vending machines in—in, like, the bachelor officer’s quarters—there was a vending machine that dispensed beer. And of course, that was in the evening. If you didn’t want to go out and buy a six pack you could just get a can of beer. Of course, when it came down the chute you had to let it sit for a few minutes—35
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: [chuckles] Yeah, I guess you would.
MS: —before you opened it up.
TS: Now, did you have—In—In this time, like, when you first went in, did you have the— officer’s call—I forget what it’s called when everybody gets together at the unit and there’s, like, a bash and there’s, pretty much, free alcohol for all the enlisted and—Did you guys have anything—like, officer’s calls—not officer’s call; that’s not what I want to call it.
MS: We would have dining-ins—
TS: Okay.
MS: —and dining-outs, but those were officer only, and it was never free alcohol. It was—There would be a bar and you would pay for the drinks, and then there was an alcoholic grog and a non-alcoholic grog.
TS: I see.
MS: And you had to go drink from the grog if—if you made a social faux pas; had your cummerbund done upside down and someone caught you, or things like that. And if you had a designated driver, then you would go to the alcoholic grog and drink. And if you didn’t, you went to the non-alcoholic grog. I will say the culture, as far as alcohol, probably changed. When I was first joined, happy hour at Friday afternoons at the club were a big thing, with the two for one drink specials or half price drink specials, and everybody went to the club for happy hour on Friday. It was the place to be.
Now you go to some of the old clubs, like at Cherry Point here, there’s not that many people there. And I think more and more people are married, and there’s so much more traffic, and now you get a DUI [driving under the influence] and it will kill your career. Back in the early eighties, it wasn’t as big a deal. It really didn’t kill your career. You could—You could recover from that. Now you really can’t. So I’d say one of the things that I've noticed that’s changed—that changed in the course of my career, was the culture and the acceptance of—of alcohol.
TS: Right, or the fact that it wasn’t accepted as—as culturally acceptable. I remember now what the—commander’s calls, is what that was; that we had—used to have.
MS: Yes. Well—And we would have, like, command picnics and things, but they were always real family oriented.
TS: Yeah?End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.

1
WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Marie S. Senzig
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: August 16, 2013
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is—What day is it?—August sixteenth—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
MS: The sixteenth.
TS: —2013. I’m at the home of Marie Senzig in New Bern, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Marie, how would you like your name to read on your collection?
MS: Probably with my rank—naval rank; Captain—
TS: Okay.
MS: —all capitalized; capital C, capital A, capital P, capital T, Marie S. Senzig.
TS: Okay, we probably—when they—when they put it on the collection they’ll do the Marie S. Senzig for the collection name.
MS: Right.
TS: And then they’ll have—we’ll have your information in the biography like that.
MS: Okay, that’s fine.
TS: Okay; alright. Well, Marie, thanks for letting me come and talk with you today. Why don’t we start out by having you tell me when and where you were born?2
MS: I was born in Baraboo, Wisconsin, December 31, 1957, and then resided in Lyndon Station. The hospital was thirty miles away, so.
TS: Okay. And so, do you have any brothers or sisters?
MS: I have seven brothers and five sisters.
TS: So you have a few.
MS: A few.
TS: Where do you fit in that hierarchy of siblings?
MS: Number six.
TS: Sixth oldest?
MS: Yes, so there’s seven below me.
TS: How many boys and how many girls do you have?
MS: Seven boys, six girls.
TS: Is that right?
MS: Yes.
TS: So who ruled that—that family?
MS: My mother.
TS: [chuckling] There you go. Did your—Did your mom work with all those kids or—
MS: She—
TS: I mean, I know she worked.
MS: She had a fulltime job in her house.
TS: That’s right.
MS: She said she liked being her own boss.
TS: That’s right.3
MS: She decided what day she did laundry, what day she did this, what day she did that. My dad was the breadwinner in the family and he worked away all week long and was only home on the weekends.
TS: What did he do?
MS: He worked for a construction company, working on high voltage lines.
TS: Oh my gosh.
MS: So if there would be a big ice storm he would be one of those people who went out with the bucket truck and didn’t come home for a couple weeks until everybody had their electricity back.
TS: That’s kind of a dangerous job, with all those kids.
MS: He did lose an eye.
TS: He did?
MS: Yes.
TS: Oh my goodness. That’s—That’s wild. Now, tell us what—So was it a rural area that you lived in; suburban? What—
MS: It was. It was a town of three hundred and fifty people.
TS: Okay.
MS: And it’s now up to four hundred and seventy-four people. There’s still not a stoplight in town.
TS: No?
MS: So—It’s rural, south central Wisconsin; a lot of dairy farms and cornfields.
TS: Well, tell us a little bit about what it was like to grow up in such a large family. That’s—Even for the time that would have been unusual for that many kids.
MS: A very Catholic family.
TS: Yeah?
MS: [chuckling] I—I think, honestly, that’s one of the things that drew me to nursing.
TS: Okay.4
MS: And especially obstetrical nursing. Every time I would go through labor with a woman—Because I practiced obstetrical nursing in a day when there weren’t laboring epidurals, so everybody got to experience the joys of labor pains, and every time I watched somebody go through labor it increased the appreciation I had for my mother going through that experience thirteen times. So I—I couldn’t imagine growing up in a small family, because whenever you wanted to do something there were always enough people to play badminton over the hedge, or get a game of softball together, or the boys with their basketball games, and there was always somebody to play Monopoly with, or to play Canasta; lots—lots of playmates all the time. And we got along pretty well that—it was a very orderly, German household. Everybody had their chores, and as long as everybody did what they were supposed to do, the household ran very smoothly, and you never showed up late for dinner if you wanted to get food.
TS: Because it would be gone, right? [chuckles]
MS: It would be gone.
TS: That’s right. So what—what would be, like, some of the chores you got to do?
MS: The women did the inside work and the men did the outside work. It was a very segregated household, in those respects.
TS: Okay, gender segregated.
MS: Yes, it was. So the women, we did the dishes, and we once asked my mother if she’d get a dishwasher and she said no, she had six of them. Not thirteen, just six, so she didn’t need a dishwasher. So it was setting the table for dinner and doing the dishes and putting the kitchen to rights afterwards; ironing; cleaning bathrooms. We had a two story house so my mother didn’t go into the upstairs; she had two daughters who lived in the upstairs and it was our job to clean it every Thursday, and bring all the laundry down, and get the laundry and then take it back upstairs. And—And you grew up learning to cook, making cornbread and making cakes and watching her get a starch and a meat and a vegetable all on the table, hot, at the same time. So to me, the holidays are not the holidays unless I have a house full of people. So when I would be over in Sardinia or Iceland or Guam, I would always invite lots of people over for the holidays. And if I cooked the whole meal they were always amazed that everything got on the table, hot, at the same time, and I had many people ask me, “How do you do that?”
And I said, “Well, you just know how if you grow up doing it and watching your mother do it in the kitchen.” We didn’t grow up with casseroles. My dad didn’t care for casseroles.
TS: Is that right? Oh my gosh.
MS: So it was always meat, potatoes, and a vegetable. 5
TS: Yeah?
MS: So you just grow up knowing how to do that.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: How to do that; when things were done and pulling it out.
MS: Right.
TS: Did you have a lot of bread—homemade bread or anything like that?
MS: Not homemade bread.
TS: But bread.
MS: Bread, yes.
TS: Did you—Did you play any sports or—
MS: I was never very good at sports. I—[chuckling] kind of—kind of klutzy. I was one of those girls that always got picked last at school for the teams, so my sports were always—I—I took up running when I was in the navy because you ran against your own time and it was a solitary sport that I didn’t have to compete against anybody.
TS: So you didn’t do it until you were in the navy though?
MS: Correct.
TS: How neat; okay. Tell me—I know what I was going to ask you was; describe your house, because I’m just wondering, like, how many kids were in a room; that kind of—
MS: We had one, two, three bedrooms downstairs and really, technically, two bedrooms upstairs, but there was a large room as you walked through that had two beds in it and then a hallway ended up with a bed in it upstairs, and that was always a younger child who didn’t require any privacy. And so, it was two people to a double bed, and we had bunk beds, and always a baby in a crib that was in somebody’s bedroom. So—
TS: So were the girls responsible for taking care of the babies, too, as you got older?
MS: I ended up potty training my youngest brother.
TS: Yeah?6
MS: My mother said he would have been in diapers till he was eighteen. She just ran out of the emotional oomph and stamina to do it one more time. And of course, it was easy for her. The child would come to her and need to have the diaper changed and she would just say, “Go see your sister.” And so, I got tired of changing dirty diapers so I pulled out the potty chair and potty trained him.
TS: [chuckles] That’s great. So you’re—Now, where was your school, like your elementary school?
MS: The elementary school was the Catholic school directly across the street though grade four, and then that closed down so starting grade five we went—it was about twelve miles up the road, so rode the school bus up to the county seat which had a whopping, like, thirty-four hundred people at it, to the Mauston-area of schools. And so, I did fifth grade through twelfth grade in that school system, and then graduated from the—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: From that?
MS: —from Mauston-area high school.
TS: So if you were—let’s see. As a young girl then, you’re growing up in the sixties at a young age.
MS: Yes.
TS: Do you remember when the—President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy was shot?
MS: I do.
TS: And the Catholic family, too, so I would wonder—
MS: I do. I—I remember being home from school that day and sitting on the couch, and distinctly remember watching the caisson rolling down the street.
TS: But do you remember when he was actually shot?
MS: I don’t remember that.
TS: No?
MS: But I do remember watching the funeral on TV.
TS: So you would have been about six years old.7
MS: Correct.
TS: Yeah. Do you remember later when Martin Luther King, Jr. was—and Robert [Francis] Kennedy; that same year; ’68?
MS: Yes; yes; I do.
TS: What was your reaction to that?
MS: It was a shame that Robert Kennedy was shot while campaigning, and the same thing with Martin Luther King [Jr.]. I mean, all those great figures and—and standing for—for certain things that some people just don’t care for.
TS: Yeah? So you were, like, elementary, middle school when the—I would say, the height of the sixties were going on.
MS: Yes.
TS: Do you—Did—Was there any counter-culture in that—in the area that you lived in in Wisconsin?
MS: I—I wouldn’t say—The state capital, Madison, is very liberal, but my mother didn’t drive so we rode the school bus to school, and you rode the school bus back home. We only got one channel on TV so the TV was really never on, and so we didn’t get exposed to a whole lot. And my parents really didn’t talk—of course, my dad was only home on the weekends, and then he was so busy working to get extra money to feed his thirteen mouths, they didn’t really talk politics. So I was not exposed to a whole lot. I mean, listened to the Beatles music along with my oldest sister who was into the Beatles, and—
TS: Yeah. So maybe your older—some of your older siblings might have had a little bit more connection to that.
MS: Correct. Correct.
TS: Neat. Well, were you—What about school? Did you like school?
MS: I was always a good student; I was one of those geeky, nerdy kids who hung out in the chemistry lab.
TS: Is that right?
MS: And then I played trumpet in the school band, so—
TS: How long did you play?8
MS: Through high school, and then I was actually the bugler and did “Taps” when I was in Guam for the military funerals there.
TS: Oh, that’s really neat.
MS: And then I—I and my younger sister played—it’s called “Echo Taps,” for my dad’s funeral because he was a World War II veteran.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: When he passed away.
TS: That’s really neat.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So you—Were you—Did you have any favorite teachers?
MS: I did, and they were probably the math and science teachers; Margaret Ann Steiner. Everybody called her Ma, for M-A; Margaret Ann, and she was my algebra teacher. And then Mr. Nathan Figi was my chemistry teacher. And Mr. Harlow Gerhardt was the biology teacher, and I had occasion last summer to actually go on a bus trip and Mr. Gerhardt was on the same bus trip. So I had a chance to go and tell him how—how I always admired his teaching style, and there are certain teachers that you remember their names and there are certain teachers you don’t, so he was one of those that I always remembered.
TS: Where were you at on the bus trip?
MS: It went to New York City.
TS: Okay.
MS: Went with my mother and my sister and my niece.
TS: Very neat.
MS: Yes.
TS: So where—Did you—Did you always want to be a nurse or—
MS: I—Yeah, from earlier times on I—that was something that always interested me.
TS: Yeah? So when you were in school was there an expectation that you were going to go to college?9
MS: College was never mentioned in our household. My dad made it through sixth grade, so his expectation was that you graduated from high school and that was—he was thrilled to have all high school graduates. The girls are the ones with college degrees. I think because it was a very male-dominate household, that was our ticket out. So my oldest sister has a PhD in clinical psychology. I have a master’s. I have another sister who has a master’s in education who’s a teacher in Montana, and another sister who has a—an associates in art and is an executive secretary. And I have a sister who’s a medical stenographer.
And my brothers—one year, at the technical school, one of them did carpentry and he has supported himself his whole life with that.
TS: Yeah.
MS: So he’s really the only one who utilized a trade that he went and got further education for.
TS: [unclear] the school.
MS: They’re all blue-collar jobs for the men. The women went out and got higher education and got the better paying jobs.
TS: I see. So what—At what point do—were you thinking about the military?
MS: My senior year in college, when it was time to start thinking about, “What do I want to do with my nursing degree?”—I knew I was a very shy, introverted person, and I had worked the entire time I was in college at our little local county hospital as a nursing assistant, so if I went back there I just had this vision of myself at age fifty, still being single, still working at that little hospital, still living in my parents’ house, and that mental image scared the heck out of me. So I did something very uncharacteristic and got out of my comfort zone, and remember vividly walking through a large snow bank to get to the navy recruiter’s office—because I always liked being around the water and I grew up landlocked in Wisconsin—and walked into the navy recruiter’s office and, like, the next week he had me up in Minneapolis [Minnesota] for a physical, and when I called my mother and told her I was thinking about joining the navy she had a very shocked response. She said, “You, of all my children, I thought would never leave me.”
And I said, “That’s why I thought I better do something drastic.” And then she wanted me to get stationed at—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did you tell her that at that time?
MS: I did.
TS: Yeah.10
MS: And then she wanted me to get stationed at [Naval Station] Great Lakes, Illinois, because it was only three and a half hours away, and I said, “No, I joined the navy to get away from home, not to be stationed close to home.” So that—that was a very drastic step for me, the—and the navy certainly has helped me bloom and develop. People who know me now can’t believe that I was ever shy and introverted. But I still do test out introvert on a Meyers-Briggs [Type Indicator], because interacting with people exhausts me, and then I need to have my alone time to recharge the batteries, and that’s the—the hallmark of a true introvert. An extrovert is energized by interactions with people.
TS: Right. I think that’s great that you talked about that because I think a lot of people have a misconception about the difference between those. It’s not that you don’t want to be around people, it’s just like you say; you’re energy doesn’t come from that.
MS: Correct.
TS: It comes from other things; your alone time and things; yeah.
MS: Right; right.
TS: That’s really neat. So you’re—you’ve joined the navy.
MS: Yes.
TS: What did your dad think?
MS: I had to, kind of, corner him to ask him, and he was—he thought it was a good decision. He thought it was a—it was a sound decision; I could make a good living. So that was—He never—He never told me to my face he was proud of me. He told other people around the town that he was proud of me. My father was—was a—was a very—a stoic German. He never—He never showed a lot of emotion. He did with my mother. I have vivid memories—I mean, she would be cooking a meal at the stove and he would come up behind her and say, “Could I have a kuss?” He never said kiss; it was kuss; must be German for kiss. And she would turn around, they’d do a little smooch on the lips, he’d say, “I love you,” and he’d walk away.
TS: Sweet.
MS: Most men, I don’t think, do that, but my father did that routinely. And so—And obviously they were demonstrative in the bedroom with thirteen children.
TS: [chuckles] Yes.
MS: But he didn’t show a lot of emotion with his children. So I—He thought it was a good decision to join the navy.11
TS: What about the rest of your siblings?
MS: I never really asked.
TS: No?
MS: Now that I’m retired and—and some of them came to my retirement ceremony, so they understood the rank that I had achieved. While I was in the navy I don’t think they really had an understanding, because the only person in the family besides my father who served was my youngest brother who was in the navy as well and was enlisted. And so, he understood about my rank and he had told me that when I retired he was going to make sure he came to my retirement ceremony, and he did. And my mother thought it was going to be this little five minute ceremony, because she came to my promotion ceremonies for commander and captain, and they’re—you stand on the quarterdeck and you raise your hand and then you have cake. And I had kind of a big whoopty party when I made O-6, which is quite an achievement. So—And quite a bit of my family came up. But it was still only a five minute ceremony, and then we had a nice party afterwards. But the retirement ceremony was an hour long, and she said afterwards she had no idea that it was that big a deal. So I never really got much from them. Now, since I’m retired, and the ones who came to the ceremony are impressed.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But usually when I go home I’m just someone who’s young enough to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the floors and cook meals and help my mother, so—
TS: Well, there you go; very good. So—So when you went—you went in the navy—let’s see—1980.
MS: Yes.
TS: And did you have any, kind of, like—You had officer training then or were you—because you would have, like, just been commissioned.
MS: Correct.
TS: Did you have to go through any, kind of—
MS: I went through six weeks of officer indoctrination school in Newport, Rhode Island [Officer Development School, Officer Training Command [OTC] Newport]—
TS: Okay.
MS: —when I first joined. So my sister Marcy—who’s a year younger than I—she and I did a little road trip in my brand new car; the first one I had ever had. I went all the way through college with my two feet for my transportation; didn’t have a bicycle; didn’t have 12
a car. So I did buy a—a stripped down model of Pontiac Phoenix; never driven a stick shift in my life, and that’s what I got so—[chuckles] I—I rolled through a lot of stop signs at the beginning when I was afraid I wouldn’t get it started again without stalling. But—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: I can relate to that.
MS: —she and I drove out together to Newport, Rhode Island, and then I think Providence was maybe where she caught a little puddle-jumper jet and prop-plane to the bigger airport, and then she flew back home.
TS: Very neat.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So was it after your—after your officer training, then where were you stationed?
MS: Millington, Tennessee.
TS: Now, did you put in for that assignment? Do you have a dream sheet, as—in the navy, for things like that?
MS: We did, and when the recruiter came to my house to swear me in, you had three choices. I really didn’t know. I had put a couple down and I couldn’t think of a third one and he said, “Well, I’ll just put Millington, Tennessee down,” and that’s where I ended up. And it’s fine. My whole career, I can’t say I had a bad duty station, because you quickly learn it’s what you make of it. Even if it wasn’t someplace you asked to go, there are always new people to meet, new friends to make, and they all turned out to be wonderful experiences. If you go expecting to have a bad experience, maybe that’s what happens. But I always went with an open mind and made lots of friends.
TS: How—Was it—Was it easy for you to, like, pick up—because how many moves did you make? You made—
MS: Oh, I think probably about ten of them.
TS: Ten, in the—in the twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years.
[Speaking Simultaneously]13
MS: Well, you get very—you get very good at it.
TS: Every two and three years.
MS: Right. And one of my friends—I think I had just gotten, maybe, here—someplace, and she came over to my house two weeks after my—I got my shipment of my household goods. And she walked in and said, “Looks like you’ve been here forever. You already have pictures on the wall.”
I said, “Well, I—I can’t live with the boxes. And so what I learned to do is open up all the boxes and put everything on the floor in the rooms.”
TS: In the rooms they belong in.
MS: And then you just—I hated to see the clutter so it forced me—And if you just have boxes neatly stacked up, some people never get to their boxes. They just move the closed boxes from place to place. And I always opened up every single box and put everything in it’s rightful place, and then I could—I could live, because I—
TS: Otherwise, it would have been difficult.
MS: It would have been stressful to me—
TS: I see.
MS: —to do it any other way, so I got very good at it.
TS: [chuckles] That’s neat. So what—At this first duty—So it’s your first duty assignment. Well, what was it like to actually—to, like, put on the uniform for the first time? How was—How did that feel?
MS: Well, luckily we did a lot of putting on the uniform in Newport, Rhode Island.
TS: Yeah?
MS: So—
TS: That’s where I mean.
MS: Oh, okay. Well, like I said, I hadn’t really been exposed to any military things, so the first thing—and growing up in a family of thirteen children and being poor, the first thing that really made an impression was they gave me three hundred dollars for a uniform allowance, and then promptly forced me to buy six hundred dollars-worth of uniforms, which created some stress in my life because now I was three hundred dollars in debt. So—Because you had a sea bag; you had to purchase certain things, and you had a uniform fitting and all that.14
TS: You had a checklist of things to get, right?
MS: Correct. Right. And when I joined we were still wearing nursing uniforms with white hose and white shoes and a nursing cap with your stripe, on the nursing cap. So—And it snapped on, so as you changed rank you just changed the stripe and kept the same nursing cap.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Is that right? Interesting; okay.
MS: Yes. Yes.
TS: What—Was there anything about officer training that was difficult, hard, challenging?
MS: I think the transition. It was funny, because in my mind I thought it was rather a rough transition. In fact, when I—some of the folks in our little Charlie Company—there were four companies; Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta; I was in Charlie—took me out to the officer’s club and got me a little inebriated because I was not—
TS: Green? [chuckles]
MS: Well, I was a little stressed.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: It was funny because at the end our company commander complimented me on what an easy, smooth transition, in his eyes, I had made to the military. And I kind of looked at him and thought, “Boy, you don’t have a clue. I almost jumped out of the window one day I was so—”
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But it—it was a nice group, and I have occasionally run into people. It’s funny because one of my closest friends, turns out, was an officer in indoctrination school at the same time I was, she was just in Delta Company and I was in Charlie Company. Oh, she was in Alpha. But—
TS: Real close together.
MS: Well, we were there at the same time.
TS: And you never knew it until many years later?15
MS: Correct. When she saw the picture on the wall in my—and said, “I have that same picture on my wall. When did you go to OIS?” And we discovered we were there at the same time.
TS: That’s interesting. There you go.
MS: Yeah.
TS: How was your first duty station?
MS: I really enjoyed it, and looking back I think I got there shortly before Thanksgiving. One of the first things that happened was—and I think she was a lieutenant commander—some navy nurse invited me over to her house for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. That’s just the way navy nurses are; very nurturing; they take people in; they make them feel welcome. And—And then she promptly had me do some house-sitting for her to watch her house; big beautiful house. Because I lived in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] for two years, so people would use me as their house-sitter. Two things: it put somebody in their house and it got me out of the BOQ for a little bit. But—And I think that warm, welcoming approach taught me that’s what you do when you have new navy nurses come onboard. You make sure that they feel welcome and that they feel taken care of, because over the years people told me that was something I did well, and I think it all stemmed back to the person that did that for me when I went to my first duty station.
TS: Do you think in that way, in the navy, maybe in the military in general, that it’s not just what you’re doing at work, it—the off duty people are looking out for each other; especially the leadership, is making sure that the junior ranking are looked after?
MS: And that’s very true. And that’s especially true when you’re overseas, and you know that some of these kids are there for the first time, far away from their parents, they’re starting a new family, and you make sure that there’s somebody there that you’re—you become their surrogate parent, and making sure that there’s food in the house, that they aren’t feeling melancholy around the holidays. And that was one of the reasons why I always cooked big meals and invited everybody over, to make sure if somebody was single that they had someplace to go. And it—A lot of the married people would invite the single sailors over to their house, but I, as a single sailor, always felt a little bit like I was crashing their family holiday. And so, when I would send out the invitations I would always say, “From one orphan to another, I’m single. You’re not crashing any family holiday. Please come over so I don’t have to make this big turkey dinner for Thanksgiving and eat it all myself.” And—And then we would spend hours playing Trivial Pursuit or whatever the latest board game was. We always had a lot of fun, and it was a mix of guys and gals, enlisted and officers, sometimes people from outside of the command; like in Iceland, the other people who lived in my building.
TS: So you had a good crowd? Yeah, actually.
MS: Yes.16
TS: Now, I heard—I don’t remember if this is on tape before or we started the tape, but you had talked about Canasta. I think you did say that.
MS: Yes.
TS: Now, did you teach very many people to play Canasta? Do you guys play Euchre in Wisconsin?
MS: Oh yes, we play Euchre.
[Canasta and Euchre are card games]
TS: Okay.
MS: And Canasta, I’ve actually found people when I cruise who play Canasta.
TS: Oh, did you?
MS: And I have taught one of my friends to play Canasta. I teach more people how to play Cribbage.
TS: Oh, Cribbage, right.
MS: And that’s a big game in Wisconsin as well.
TS: Yeah?
MS: And Sheepshead is a big Wisconsin card game that very people—few people know. It’s a German—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: That one I have not heard of. I have not heard of that one.
MS: It’s a German card game, so.
TS: Yeah, I know, in being from a wintery state, you’re used to playing a lot more board games and—
MS: Correct.17
TS: —keeping yourself occupied during the winter months when you’re inside, so yeah.
MS: Correct. Correct.
TS: Now, was this, like, the first time you’d been away from home for a long time, except for, I mean, being in college?
MS: It was. It was.
TS: Was that difficult?
MS: I don’t remember it being particularly difficult, I think because during college I only went home—since I didn’t have a car, I only went home when there was a holiday school break. So I was away from home, basically, the whole semester, and would just go home at the semester break.
TS: Yeah. But now you’re out on your own and—
MS: It—I would go home occasionally because Memphis was about a twelve and a half hour drive.
TS: Not too bad.
MS: It was pretty straight, south to north, up [Interstate]-57 and around Chicago and home.
TS: How did you like your job?
MS: I did. I started out—There were three of us who checked in at the same time, and the director of nursing, we were all in her office together, and she said, “Well, I need somebody to go to the med[ical]/surg[ical] ward, I need somebody to go to the obstetrics ward,” and “Who wants to go to obstetrics?” And nobody raised their hand and my hand shot right up in the air. “Well, that was an easy one. Okay, Ensign Senzig, you—you go to obstetrics,” and I had some great civilian teachers.
TS: Did you?
MS: Civilian nurses who were teachers, yeah.
TS: What was it that they helped you with?
MS: Learning to be an obstetrical nurse.
TS: Just the whole nine yards?
MS: Yeah; yes. And I—Like I said, back in the day before there were laboring epidurals, one of them, we called her Admiral.18
TS: Even though she was a civilian?
MS: Right.
TS: Okay.
MS: Because she told the doctors what to write and they wrote the orders, because she had been a nurse for years. And I was coaching one of the labor patients and she said—pulled me out of the room and she said, “Now, I’m going to tell you, this is the time when you lie. If they look you in the face and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Have you ever had any children?’ you look them square in the eye and you say, ‘Yes.’”
TS: [chuckling]
MS: “Otherwise, they’re not going to do what you tell them to do.”
TS: And so did you stick with that advice?
MS: I don’t think anybody really ever asked me.
TS: Okay. It never came—
MS: Because if you act like you know what you’re doing and you obviously know how to coach them, that’s not really something they ask.
TS: And they’re not thinking about that.
MS: No.
TS: They’re thinking about other things, right?
MS: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
MS: And they’re some very interesting stories from labor and delivery.
TS: Well, tell me one.
MS: Well, the one—I think I was working the night shift and there was—a very young gal came in. She must have been thirteen; very, very young. And she was in labor and there was nobody in the room with her. Her parents were probably out in the waiting room. And she was screaming all the time, and I’d go in and say, “Are you in pain? Do you need me to get you some Demerol; some pain medicine?”
“No, I’m okay.”19
And you’d go out and she’d be hooping and hollering again. And I’d go in and she would—never said she needed anything. And finally one of the times I went in I said, “Well, if you don’t need pain medicine, why are you yelling so loud? Why are you screaming?”
And she said, “Well, my mother told me the baby comes out of my mouth, and I have to open my mouth up wide enough for the baby to come through.”
And I said, “Oh, I hate to tell you, the baby’s not coming from there.”
TS: Oh, goodness.
MS: “You remember where that boy put that thing to plant that little seed in your tummy?” I said, “That’s where the baby is coming out.” And her eyes got really big.
TS: [chuckling] Oh my gosh. How old was she?
MS: I think she was probably twelve or thirteen.
TS: Oh, Lord.
MS: She was very young.
TS: Wow.
MS: We had some very young teens in Tennessee.
TS: So was it—it was a civilian hospital or—
MS: No, no, it was a military hospital and the parent—
TS: Was in the—I see. But just a young girl—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
MS: Either was retired military or was active duty.
TS: I see.
MS: And if their child got pregnant, the child was eligible for care.
TS: I see.
MS: Now, the baby got an initial six-week checkup, and then the baby was not eligible for care unless the parents adopted the baby.20
TS: Did that happen?
MS: Not usually.
TS: No?
MS: They went and found civilian healthcare for the baby.
TS: I see.
MS: Yeah.
TS: Now, so why were there civilians nurses?
MS: Because there weren’t enough navy nurses.
TS: Oh.
MS: There’s never enough navy nurses.
TS: There’s not?
MS: So you supplement with civilian staff.
TS: Okay.
MS: Plus, it gives some continuity. As your navy nurses are moving in and out—your navy corpsmen—you’ve got some stability.
TS: In a particular place.
MS: Right.
TS: Okay. Well, we’re going—I’m going to go through some of the places that you were at and—but I would like to know—Now, you said every assignment is what you make it, right?
MS: Yes.
TS: And you went there with—so it’s [unclear] a good experience everywhere, but if there was, like, a place you never wanted to leave—Was—Was there one like that? Like, the best assignment, for whatever reason?
MS: Well, it’s interesting because there were cities I really liked, and then there were duty assignments I really liked. 21
TS: Well, let’s talk about the cities you really liked.
MS: I really enjoyed Charleston, South Carolina; gorgeous city. My mother always thought I would go there to retire, so she was kind of surprised I didn’t. And I said, “Well, the state of North Carolina doesn’t tax my military retirement pay. The state of South Carolina does. Charleston’s close enough I can go and visit.”
So I enjoyed—I guess I—I really enjoyed Puerto Rico as well. As far as the people I worked with, Guam was one of my more favorite duty stations. I loved the climate. I made some—two really, really good friends there who remain dear friends of mine to this day.
And the camaraderie in Iceland. The weather was terrible. I don’t need to go back there and live again. I got two winters and one summer in my nineteen months there. But the camaraderie. Since the weather was so horrible the warmth of the people made up for it, and we had a very small hospital. And I was the chief nurse there and there were only fifteen navy nurses, and our commanding officer was a very warm, gracious man and he—he was an excellent leader.
So—And we were always doing potlucks, so there’s always cooking to be done, and I love to cook so I got ample opportunity to cook. So I would say probably—and you’re probably noticing this trend—Puerto Rico, Guam, and Iceland.
TS: So your overseas?
MS: Overseas duty stations.
TS: Yeah. And so, you got to do that three—three times out of your—
MS: Four times.
TS: Four times?
MS: Sardinia was also a—
TS: How was that?
MS: That was probably my most interesting, challenging duty—
TS: Now, where’s Sardinia?
MS: It’s a little island off—Maddalena was a little archipelago of islands off the northern coast of Sardinia. Sardinia is the main island, but I was on a little island off the main island, which then sat off the coast of Italy. So I always told people I was on an island off an island off the coast of Italy.
TS: Okay.22
MS: So you—And it was about a twelve square mile island. You could bicycle around it in about an hour and a half.
TS: It’s like [unclear] Island.
MS: Yes. And so, I was the officer in charge of the clinic, so logistics were always a challenge, as far as just getting things to our little branch medical clinic. And it was before the days of computers on everybody’s desk. We had an admin[istrative] office that had, like, three computers. I, as the officer in charge of the clinic, did not have a computer in my office, and I had no air conditioning in my office. I was on the third floor and it was 107 degrees sometimes down there. And so, you had a ceiling fan, and I had my own balcony with French glass doors, so you’d open up the wind—open up the French doors, have the ceiling fan on, and you would put a rock to hold the papers down in your inbox so they wouldn’t blow all over your office. And if I needed something typed I took it over to the admin office and they did it and then they brought it back, and then I proofed it, made changes, and sent it back over for them to do again.
But it was very entrusting and I had a—the commanding officer of the naval support activity, who was a line officer, who was a mustang—People who are military understand that. It means he was enlisted first and came up through the ranks and then got a degree and became an officer. And he and I would go running at lunch time, and he would say, “Well, what problems are you having today? Is there anything I can help you with?” And we would discuss things while we were doing our lunchtime run, and he was a great support for me because my bosses were over in Naples, Italy; we were a branch clinic of Naples. And if I didn’t tell him, they didn’t know what was going on. I was at the pointy end of the spear, so to speak. And we had a fax machine, and that’s what we lived and died by, was the fax machine. And if we ran out of fax paper it was an emergency. [both chuckle]
TS: Yeah, I can see.
MS: And it was the old thermal paper fax machine and it—
TS: With the purple color and—
MS: Yes, and it was down in the basement of the clinic, down in the dental offices, and our supplies were up in the attic. And so, when the supplies came in somebody would get on the 1MC [1 Main Circuit; public address circuits on U.S. Navy vessels] or the intercom and they would say, “Supply truck is out front. Supply truck is out front,” and that means—meant all available hands muster downstairs, and everybody would unload the truck, including the officer in charge, and you would schlep—And you couldn’t drink the water. It had heavy minerals in it, and—which would leech into your brain and cause problems, so bottled water for everything. So you had to lug so—
[Speaking Simultaneously]23
TS: They didn’t have a purifying system or anything?
MS: No.
TS: No? Wouldn’t work?
MS: —so much bottled water up those stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, basically to the attic, so many, many trips. And we didn’t have an elevator. And the doctors’ offices were on the second floor, so when the pregnant women came in—
TS: Oh, goodness.
MS: —they had to take the stairs as well. So—And the pregnant women got sent to Naples, Italy, when they reached thirty-six weeks to something called the stork’s nest, and it was basically, kind of, a—a hotel or bed and breakfast, and the women would sit there and just wait to go into labor, because we were a little tiny island and there was a little local hospital but it was kind of 1950s and this was 1990s.
TS: So you were like a clinic, then?
MS: We were a clinic.
TS: Clinic, okay.
MS: We had two family medicine doctors, and two nurses, and about fifteen corpsmen. And so, when medical emergencies came in—We got to deliver a baby in the middle of the night in the clinic one night. [chuckles] So at—to me—And the family medicine doc, he loved obstetrics. The only job [unclear] him on this tour was he didn’t get to do obstetrics and deliver babies. And I was an obstetrics nurse so, to us, it was no big deal to just, kind of, catch this baby. And—But the executive officer—the naval support activity—thought it was big news because I went down—Once a week we met and all the officers in charge of, what were called, tenant[?] commands—you would get together and the executive officer would relay all the news and any things coming up, and then you would go through and tell them all the news from your command; “We have a health fair coming up,” or “We have an inspection,” or this and that, or “Doctor So-and-so is going to be in leave so there’ll be a different doctor coming in,” or “The optometrist will be over for a week from Naples so if you want to schedule appointments our books are open”; those kinds of things.
And so, I had given my little blurb of what was going on and she said to me, “Well, Commander Senzig, you didn’t tell is the most exciting thing.”
And I looked at her and I said, “Ma’am, what are you talking about?”
She said, “Well, you have a big pink stork on the door of your clinic.”
I said, “Oh, yeah, we delivered a baby in the middle of the night.”
She said, “Well—”24
I said, “Well, look, I’m an obstetrics nurse. It’s no big deal.” But they all thought—And then all the pregnant ladies wanted to know why they still had to go to Naples; why couldn’t they just stay here and deliver their baby in the clinic in the middle of the night.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: So we had to explain that was not really how we did things, but—
TS: Right, that was an unusual circumstance.
MS: It was. It was.
TS: Yeah.
MS: And then it was a challenge when we would have deaths, trying to get the bodies off the island because, if you remember I said, it was an island so we had to go by the ferry’s schedule, and then the ferry took you to just the other side—from this little island to the very northern part of Sardinia, an island, then it was an hour and a half through curvy, mountainous roads to get to the airport in Olbia, and then the military would fly a plane in to take the body in the casket—the pinewood box—and then fly them to Naples to then embalm them.
So if it’s summertime and it’s 107 degrees, and you’re sitting on the tarmac in an air conditioned ambulance, yes, but it’s only air conditioned—
TS: For a short period of time?
MS: No, for hours sometimes.
TS: Oh, okay.
MS: So they learned to ask us when the next ferry was so they could bring the plane in shortly after we arrive there. So we had to use the produce truck—the refrigerated produce truck. We started using that to transport the bodies in the coffins to Olbia.
TS: To keep it refrigerated.
MS: Right. And—And the—the buyer for the navy exchange, who was a gal, said to me, “Please don’t ever tell the workers that we used this truck for that or they will never put produce in it again.”
TS: Right.
MS: So I mean, it was a—it was challenges. And then we had a—we had a naval—a submarine tender that was homeported there, which is why we were there; to support the 25
submarine tender. And women could serve onboard the ship, but of course you don’t put pregnant women onboard the ship; they get screened out.
Well, somebody fell through the cracks and delivered a baby very prematurely onboard the ship, so we get this frantic call. And then you’re trying to get a doctor with a—with a little preemie isolette and some corpsmen, so we had to use the commodore’s boat to take them out to the ship. And of course the ship doesn’t have endotracheal tubes for a little twenty-eight week old baby, so the baby didn’t make it. But then the whole investigation—how did a pregnant woman—and it was her third baby, so how do you—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did she know she was pregnant?
MS: —not know you’re pregnant with a third baby? I don’t know, but—
TS: She said she didn’t know, though?
MS: Right. She said she didn’t know. But—So it was just—And then trying to get the baby off. So we had to—And then the gal who delivered in the clinic, we had to go down to the town square and we had registered the baby in the town books as a—as a live birth and then the baby had dual residency; Italy and—and the United States. And so, it was very interesting tour.
TS: Yeah, it does—it sounds like it was.
MS: It was.
TS: And how long was that tour?
MS: That was two years.
TS: That was two years? And that was—let me see on my list here.
MS: That was 1993 to 1995.
TS: Okay, ’93 to ’95.
MS: I was a lieutenant commander and that was where I—I got selected for commander; found out I had been selected for commander while I was there.
TS: Oh, neat. Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your promotions and things like that. So having become a captain, do you feel that you were treated fairly throughout your career for promotions?26
MS: Oh, absolutely.
TS: Yeah?
MS: Yeah. If there was any bias it was not with me being a woman; it was single versus married.
TS: Why is that?
MS: When I was in Iceland, I was the only single, and coincidentally the only female, O-6, but it nothing to do with me being female. But with me being single, I was not allowed to live in the O-6 quarters.
TS: Why not?
MS: Because I wasn’t married. Those were married quarters. But they could have taken any of those quarters and the commanding officer of the base could have designated it a bachelor officers’ quarters, had he been so inclined. He was not so inclined, so I would—
TS: Is that how that works at other places too?
MS: Generally, if you are single, there’s not a lot—if you’re a single officer, a lot of the bachelor officer quarters are only transient; they’re not for people to—
TS: Live in permanently.
MS: —permanent residency.
TS: Same for men and women?
MS: Right. And so, if you’re a single officer, you, more times than not, end up living off base. Where if you were a married officer, there would be more on base housing. Dislocation allowance was given to married people but not to single people. I guess it—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What’s dislocation allowance?
MS: They gave you—When you’re moving you can’t move any of your dangerous kitchen chemical. You can’t move the—the Pledge, the toilet bowl cleaner, the this, the that. You don’t want to take your dirty broom and your dirty mop to another place, so a lot of that stuff has to get thrown out and you have to buy new wherever you go.
TS: Okay, so the—so you get an allowance for those kinds of things?27
MS: Correct.
TS: I see.
MS: Correct. And they didn’t give it to the single people who moved into the same type of quarters as the married. I still moved into an apartment that had three bedrooms, and I had to clean and I had to go out and buy all those things just like the married person did. They got reimbursed for it; I did not. So if there was any bias it was not—I didn’t encounter gender bias, I encountered—It was more beneficial to go in and be married and have a spouse than it was to be single.
TS: Did you find assignments went that way too?
MS: No, not really.
TS: No?
MS: No.
TS: Just where the slot was available?
MS: Right; right. They didn’t—Now, the only place would be—some of these places, if they’re remote, if you have a child or spouse who has health problems, they could not go. They’d have to stay back behind. Where if they had a different place they could send you where the services were available for them, then they would send you there, but—
TS: The serviceperson or the—
MS: Correct.
TS: Okay.
MS: Right.
TS: So the—
MS: But with me being single, I never had to worry about, “Were there services for my child, for my spouse?” So it really opened more things up for me, being single.
TS: How?
MS: Because I didn’t have to worry about taking the family along, and were there services for them or not. Now, when I first joined the navy they didn’t allow women onboard ship, and so that’s why so many overseas duty stations makes you competitive, just like shipboard duty makes you competitive. And partway through they did open up shipboard 28
assignments to women, but by then I was an obstetrical nurse. They still don’t allow pregnant sailors onboard ship, so that—
TS: So that would mean—
MS: Right.
TS: I see. I thought that they opened up some ships to women in the seventies. Maybe it was just a—
MS: For line officers, I think.
TS: I see; okay.
MS: Yeah.
TS: So you’re—I’m just going to ask you, then, about your— [phone rings] What was that? Do you need to get that? I think—Okay.
So we talk about your twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years that you were in, from 1980 through 2008.
MS: Yes.
TS: The time—That period of time for women underwent a lot of change, not only in the military but in the civilian world too. Did you—Were you cognizant of those changes as they were happening, or sitting back and reflecting on it, in the navy? Can you—Can you talk about that at all?
MS: I guess maybe it’s more sitting back and reflecting, because when I was in there—the one change that I do remember was when I came in, probably my second duty station, was when women were finally allowed to stay on active duty if they got pregnant. So the navy nurses, there were no pregnancy uniforms. At first, they had to go out and buy civilian pregnancy nursing uniforms, and then the military did come out with maternity uniforms for pregnant sailors, but that was one of the things that changed. And then when I first came in, once they did allow women to stay on active duty if they got pregnant, then it was—you could still, no strings attached, say, “I’d rather get out,” and they let you out of your contract. Then they quickly discovered a lot of young kids who weren’t adjusting, or didn’t like the rules and the rigors of military life, were getting pregnant just to get out of their contract; kind of a long term solution to a short term problem. So they changed the rules to make it not quite so easy to get out if you got pregnant.
Then when they allowed women onboard ship, and women were routinely assigned to shipboard duty, the same thing was happening. Women were getting pregnant to get out of shipboard duty. So it used to be if they got pregnant they would take them off the ship, cut them a whole new set of orders, and send them to another duty station. So then they got wind, and got a little savvier, that girls were getting pregnant just to get off the ship. Again, long term solution to a short term problem.29
So then, what they instituted was, “Okay, you come off the ship while you’re pregnant, but four months after delivery you resume your shipboard duty on that same ship.” Now, not only are you onboard ship, but you’ve got to leave your baby with somebody else, and find somebody to take care of your baby. So once they instituted that and word got out to these gals that you were still going to complete your shipboard duty, the reasons for girls getting pregnant kind of went away. And we still do have some “ooops,” because when you put eighteen year old hormones together with males and females onboard ship in tight quarters, they find all kinds of little spaces to have fun, and sometimes birth control fails or they don’t always exercise it, and girls still do get pregnant but not in the numbers they did when they were first assigned shipboard duty.
TS: So it was like a learning curve for the navy to figure out—
MS: Right.
TS: —the balance.
MS: Right, and then the tail follows once they figure out what’s going on, and then they can bring in the—the regulations to fix that.
TS: I see; very interesting.
MS: Yes.
TS: Now, did you see changes for nursing as you were—over that twenty[-eight – MS corrected later] years? I’m sure you did.
MS: Changes in the [U.S.] Navy Nurse Corps. When I first came in we had one admiral in the navy nurse corps. Navy nurses, the most you could achieve was to be a director of nursing at a hospital. That was the pinnacle of your career, other than the one person who was the admiral of the Navy Nurse Corps. Now, navy nurses are commanding officers of hospitals, they’re executive officers of hospitals. We have more than one admiral. We have a three star admiral, we have a two star admiral, we have one star admiral.
TS: So were the—the executive officers of—commanding officers, were they doctors at the hospitals or what—
MS: It used to be it was always the physician who was the commanding officer.
TS: Okay.
MS: Now they usually try to have either the executive officer or the commanding officer be a physician. And now it might be either a physician or a navy nurse. A lot of times, one of them will be a Medical Service Corps officer.
TS: Okay.30
MS: Because they have the admin side of the house.
TS: Did you see any changes in actually nursing techniques; things like that?
MS: Well, in labor and delivery, laboring epidurals are now the norm—
TS: Right.
MS: —which they weren’t way back when. Now they Skype deliveries.
TS: They do?
MS: So—
TS: How do they do that?
MS: Well—
TS: How do they Skype a delivery?
MS: Well, somebody’s there with the—the—the computer, with a video camera and Wi-Fi [wireless internet connection], with the husband over in Iraq or Afghanistan, where they’ll video it and then they’ll—they’ll send the video, but now they do do some Skyping.
TS: Okay, so it’s like someone’s Skyping it—I see, okay. Somehow—
MS: So they can attend the delivery.
TS: I see. Interesting. So that kind of communication has—has changed—
MS: Right.
TS: —for staying connected with your family—
MS: Right.
TS: —in that way. Now, did you stay in obstetricians—that field the whole time?
MS: As you get more senior it becomes more administrative. In Charleston I became, what’s called, the division officer, which is the charge nurse of the labor and delivery unit, and so I still did lots of labor and delivery, and then I would go to my office at the end of the shift and do the paperwork.
Sardinia was where I was—it was a clinic so it was strictly administrative, although with us being two nurses we did carry a radio/pager for a week at a time. So if 31
somebody needed IV [intravenous] antibiotics, we’d come into the clinic and do it around the clock; those types of things. But it was mostly administrative.
And then Keflavík, Iceland, even though I was the chief nurse we only—there were only fifteen us so if they needed—especially if we had a laboring patient and the nurse didn’t have a lot of labor and delivery experience, I let them know that they were free to call me and I would come in and sit with them and help them out. So I did that a couple times. They would call me and I would go in and sit with them.
We had a patient who was quite ill; I wasn’t sure the nurse had the—the background, I wasn’t real comfortable, so I just came in and did the shift with them. And once I recognized that the patient was—because it was a patient who had preeclampsia, which is a post-partum—antepartum problem, and being a labor and delivery nurse I knew a lot, and he didn’t have really any labor and delivery background. So once her kidneys kicked in I knew she had rounded the corner and I said to him, “Okay, I’m going to go catch a couple hours of sack time now in that room. She’s out of the woods."
So—But otherwise it was—And I would do the occasional weekend when they were short a nurse in rotation because someone was out. And there I was the acting executive officer, the acting commanding officer when the commanding officer and executive officer were gone.
And then my last duty station here, I was—
TS: [Marine Corps Base] Camp Lejeune?
MS: Yeah. Started out the Deputy Director of the branch clinics, and a lot of the—in charge of getting the supplies and ordering new equipment, doing all the fitness reports and the evaluations for the corpsmen; did a lot of the administrative work because the director was a physician. So I let him interact as a physician and a guy with the line officers, and I took care of the admin behind the scenes things, and that worked very well for us. And then I went over to the hospital and became the quality manager, so—in charge of making sure that we followed all the joint commission regulations and the Inspector General of the navy regulations, and that our care was safe.
TS: Right. Well, now, when you became—Well, I guess I don’t know if I want to get there yet or not, because I kind of want to go back to some of your earlier assignments when you were—had less rank.
MS: Yes.
TS: And so, you went to—So after Tennessee you went—Is that when you went to Puerto Rico right away?
MS: Yes.
TS: Oh, tell me about that. How was that?
MS: That was—It was fun. My person who had been my charge nurse in Millington, Tennessee—surprise, surprise—was my charge nurse in Puerto Rico, so I already knew 32
my boss. So going down, that wasn’t an anxiety producing thing. And back in the days when we had nurseries, I was assigned to the nursery, and—and would come out and help with labor and delivery when they needed help. That’s where—I think I had delivered one baby in Millington, Tennessee with a doctor standing over my soldier because they knew I was going overseas and wanted to make sure I had a delivery under my belt. And I delivered, I think, four more babies in Puerto Rico because, oops, they don’t always get there.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Just—Because you were just there—Yeah, I see.
MS: Right. And babies come fast sometimes. I—I don’t know what to say about Puerto Rico. I mean, I sometimes got pulled over to the medical-surgical ward to help out over there. You kind of became a nurse of all trades. And I would say actually, from Puerto Rico to Bethesda [Maryland] was where I worked on the labor and delivery for two years, and then I got called into my supervisor’s office one day and told that, basically, starting the next day I was getting assigned to the post-op cardio-thoracic surgery unit. I—
TS: Had no idea what you were—had in that experience for that, right?
MS: I didn’t—Right, and I didn’t have a choice, and I was not very happy with that decision, and took every opportunity when I was up there to offer to run lab work, because I would—I would cry on the way to the lab, give myself a good talking to, get it out of my system, and by the time I got back I was good to go again. And actually I ended up liking the unit after I learned a little bit about cardiac nursing and got good at it. And—But you didn’t always have a choice where you went. So that was probably one of the more stressful times; getting pulled out of an area where I knew I wanted to go get my master’s degree and was going to submit paperwork to do that, and told that I was going to go do something totally different that I had no training for.
TS: How did that work out for you?
MS: Well, actually, the medical-surgical part of it stood me in good stead, like when I was doing the quality management piece here, because you—you understood post-op surgical and—and chest tubes and some other things. So it makes you a better rounded nurse to have different, varied experiences. And I had the—the out-patient experience from when I was in Sardinia, and then again when I was over at the submarine base in Washington state.
TS: Is that like another one of—getting out of your comfort zone a little bit?
MS: Yes.33
TS: Was that—Like, did you have to be pushed a little for that, sometimes?
MS: Well, that time I wasn’t given a choice.
TS: [chuckling]
MS: I was pushed over the ledge.
TS: Okay.
MS: Told to find a soft landing.
TS: Did you have—Well, actually, let’s pause it for a second here.
[Recording Paused]
TS: I’m going to say we’re back. Okay, we took a short, little break, and so I’m back here with Marie. And Marie was just telling me that she has a—some—something you’d like to tell me about your experience in Puerto Rico.
MS: It was—We left off I told you I was a labor and delivery nurse—
TS: Right.
MS: —and delivered some babies there. And it would be funny because I would be in the nursery on a day shift and the chief nurse—director of nursing—would come up and she’d say, “We got a request for five navy nurses to come for lun—have lunch on the Australian ship [unclear] that pulled into port this morning. So you’re here. You go ahead and go, and I’m sure they’ll be serving alcohol so please don’t come back to work this afternoon.” So you’d get the afternoon off and you’d go have lunch and drink beer with some Aussie officers. And it’d be funny because they always would radio ahead and ask for navy nurses, assuming they were all girls.
TS: [chuckles]
MS: But we had some single male navy nurses, so every once in a while they would come along too, and the looks on these guys’ faces when they found the male navy nurses there.
But yeah, I—We went to a German ship, we went to an Australian ship, went to a British ship.
TS: Were they all males on those ships?
MS: They were.34
TS: Yeah?
MS: This was back in the eighties, so yes, they were. And then there was a—On the admiral’s lawn—the admiral’s quarters—they had, kind of, a mixer for the officers from—and I’m pretty sure it was the Aussie ship and the American, so we—we all went—the navy nurses—and we were playing croquet and they had this big cake—sheet cake with an Australian flag and an American flag with hands hold—And so, it was kind of a mixer to promote good relations between the Australian military and the U.S. military, and frequently joint exercises and things. So that—that was kind of an interesting sideline, that I got a chance to go onboard some of the ships form the other countries and meet some of their officers.
TS: How were you treated on those—on those ships?
MS: Oh, we were always treated like royalty because we were their guests. They wanted these navy nurses to come and mix and mingle because they’d been out to sea for a while, all these guys. They just liked to look at girls.
TS: [chuckles] It’s not one of those things where what happens on the ship stays on the ship?
MS: No, no.
TS: Just all—
MS: It was—It was—It was pretty much above board.
TS: Okay; pretty much.
MS: Pretty much above board.
TS: Okay. But you did do some of the—not going back to work because of the—having some alcohol, right?
MS: Right, and it was funny because when I first joined the navy in Millington, Tennessee, it was okay to have a beer at lunch and go back to work. We never did in the hospital, but when I would have a day off during the week and I’d go over to the exchange, the guys would be in their dungarees having lunch and they’d have their beer because it was perfectly acceptable. And it was probably a couple of years in the—it was in the early eighties sometime when that culture changed and they were not allowed to. And as you and I were discussing, the vending machines in—in, like, the bachelor officer’s quarters—there was a vending machine that dispensed beer. And of course, that was in the evening. If you didn’t want to go out and buy a six pack you could just get a can of beer. Of course, when it came down the chute you had to let it sit for a few minutes—35
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: [chuckles] Yeah, I guess you would.
MS: —before you opened it up.
TS: Now, did you have—In—In this time, like, when you first went in, did you have the— officer’s call—I forget what it’s called when everybody gets together at the unit and there’s, like, a bash and there’s, pretty much, free alcohol for all the enlisted and—Did you guys have anything—like, officer’s calls—not officer’s call; that’s not what I want to call it.
MS: We would have dining-ins—
TS: Okay.
MS: —and dining-outs, but those were officer only, and it was never free alcohol. It was—There would be a bar and you would pay for the drinks, and then there was an alcoholic grog and a non-alcoholic grog.
TS: I see.
MS: And you had to go drink from the grog if—if you made a social faux pas; had your cummerbund done upside down and someone caught you, or things like that. And if you had a designated driver, then you would go to the alcoholic grog and drink. And if you didn’t, you went to the non-alcoholic grog. I will say the culture, as far as alcohol, probably changed. When I was first joined, happy hour at Friday afternoons at the club were a big thing, with the two for one drink specials or half price drink specials, and everybody went to the club for happy hour on Friday. It was the place to be.
Now you go to some of the old clubs, like at Cherry Point here, there’s not that many people there. And I think more and more people are married, and there’s so much more traffic, and now you get a DUI [driving under the influence] and it will kill your career. Back in the early eighties, it wasn’t as big a deal. It really didn’t kill your career. You could—You could recover from that. Now you really can’t. So I’d say one of the things that I've noticed that’s changed—that changed in the course of my career, was the culture and the acceptance of—of alcohol.
TS: Right, or the fact that it wasn’t accepted as—as culturally acceptable. I remember now what the—commander’s calls, is what that was; that we had—used to have.
MS: Yes. Well—And we would have, like, command picnics and things, but they were always real family oriented.
TS: Yeah?End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.